What the Salt Flats Remember

The salt flats hold the outline of a sea that left before anyone was watching— a pale insistence, white as forgotten vowels, spreading to the mountains like a rumor.

You walk and the ground clicks under you, each step breaking the crust of some older year. Below: a dark layer the geologists call nothing but the rain calls home.

A hawk crosses the white without shadow. The air is so dry it drinks the sound of your name. Whatever you carry here becomes the color of the plain— even grief, eventually, goes mineral.

At the edge, where the road returns to asphalt, a child traces the horizon with one finger as though it were a word she almost knew— the kind that means both threshold and forgetting.