Salt Cathedral

Somewhere beneath the mountain a cathedral hollowed itself from salt, each crystal a slow syllable the earth spent centuries pronouncing.

Miners found it by accident, their lanterns catching the walls like sunrise trapped in quartz — a brightness that had never needed eyes.

Now tourists walk the nave in sneakers, licking their fingers after touching pillars, tasting what the Permian sea left behind when it finished being a sea.

The guides say the walls weep in summer, that the whole structure migrates imperceptibly downward, a glacier made of flavor.

I think of all the rooms still sealed in darkness, their acoustics perfect for no one, their salt dissolving into the blind water table one molecule at a time.