Salt Harvest

The workers move at dawn across the flats, knee-deep in brine that holds the sky's reflection — pink and colorless at once, a mirror that forgets itself by noon.

They rake the crystals into low white ridges, each scrape a small erasure of the water. The salt was ocean once, was rain, was the body's keeping, its insistence on itself.

By afternoon the heat has bleached the hours. A woman wraps her face in cloth. Her shadow leans away from her as if it knows some other place to be.

What we extract, we carry. What we leave dissolves to nothing or becomes the thin bright crust next year's hands will break again.

The trucks come in at dusk, already rusting. Everything that touches salt is changed — metal, skin, the flavor of the bread we eat without thinking of the sea.