Salt Flats at Low Water

The lake retreated in the night, left its white geometry behind— a mirror that forgot the sky and learned to hold the sun instead.

We walked out where the crust gave slightly underfoot, a skin over nothing, over minerals older than the word for thirst.

Our shadows stretched ahead of us like arguments we couldn't finish, thinning at the edges where the heat lifted everything to haze.

My grandmother kept a jar of salt from a sea that no longer exists. I think of her hands, the careful lid, how she preserved what vanished anyway.

Out here the silence has a texture— crystalline, resistant, faintly sweet. The kind that forms around an absence and becomes, with time, its own country.