What the Salt Flats Know

The salt flats hold nothing back— each grain a white tooth, the whole plain bared like a confession that has outlasted the one who made it.

Somewhere beneath, the lake remembers being full. Water still dreams in the mineral dark, pressing its old self against what replaced it.

You drove out here at dawn because a map showed blankness and blankness seemed honest, seemed like a place you could stand without being read.

The mountains at the rim are the same mountains that watched the water leave. They have learned to look at absence the way you have not.

Light doubles itself on the white ground. You walk and your shadow walks beside you, equally lost, equally white, equally unable to say why it came.