Salt Flats at the End of the Dry Season

The cracked earth opens its mouth in a thousand thin seams, each one a sentence the ground could not finish.

A heron stands at the far edge where the mud still remembers water — one foot raised, one foot sunk, held between two kinds of leaving.

The sun makes the surface white as a page no one has written on. Even my shadow here looks borrowed, laid flat across someone else's absence.

At dusk the salt catches pink the way a wound takes light — gently, completely, as if it had been waiting all along to be seen as beautiful.