What the Salt Flats Remember

The white plain holds nothing and everything—a sea that chose to stay, then changed its mind about staying.

Footprints from last century still pressed into the crust, the mineral patience of forgetting slower than we imagined.

A woman walked here once with her shoes in her hand, the heat coming up through her soles like a question she had stopped asking.

Her shadow has long since rejoined the shadows of clouds. The flat keeps her weight in its own language, syllables of salt and pressure.

At dusk the sky drops into the surface and doubles itself without shame. We stand at the seam unable to say which world is the world we came from.