What the Salt Flats Hold

The salt flats hold light differently than water does— flat, indifferent, a mirror that refuses your face and gives you sky instead.

Somewhere beneath the crust, old brine remembers the shapes of fish, the press of tides that pulled before there were words for pulling.

We drove out at noon because we wanted to feel small. The heat came up in visible waves, the horizon shook like a held breath.

My grandmother said the body keeps records the mind never bothers to translate— a flinch before the door opens, a thirst with no object.

Stand here long enough and the ground begins to hum. Not sound, exactly. More like the memory of sound, the place where something loud once was.