Salt Flats at Low Water

The lake went out slowly, like a thought you keep meaning to finish. What it left behind holds the light differently — a white geography no map has claimed.

Your boots make the sound of old paper crossing this floor of dissolved mountains. The horizon leans in from every side at once, equal and enormous, patient as arithmetic.

Somewhere below the crust, brine moves in channels that haven't seen air since before your name was a word anyone knew to say.

You stop. The silence here has texture — a mineral silence, dense and particulate. You are the only vertical thing in a country that forgot up.

Walking back, the sun multiplies itself across the flats in every direction, and you carry a smear of white on each boot like a signature from the earth that doesn't need your name in return.