Salt Flats at Dusk

The lake dried centuries before we arrived, leaving its ghost flat as a held breath— a mirror that forgot the sky and learned to keep it anyway.

We drove until the road gave up and stood where nothing cast a shadow, the horizon a seam between two whites, the air thick with what salt remembers.

You said something about your father. I watched a bird far off, a dark stitch pulling loose from the edge of things, and didn't ask you to repeat it.

By evening the crust turned rose, then the color of an old bruise fading. The car grew cold. We didn't move. Some silences you enter rather than fill.