Salt Flats at Low Sun

The brine pan holds the sky like a second sky, trembling at the edges where heat has no name, and the mountains float above their own weight, purple as old bruises, unmoving.

I walked out until the shore disappeared. Behind me, nothing. Ahead, the same nothing folded into itself, each step a white crunch that the silence swallowed whole.

A crow crossed the sun once, tilted, and its shadow on the crust lasted longer than the bird itself — black comma dragged across a sentence no one wrote.

There is a kind of beauty that refuses comfort: the flat light, the mineral smell, the way distance here is not longing but the world simply being its full size.

I stayed until the colors went unreasonable — pink bleeding into the white, the white becoming the inside of something, and my own silhouette the only dark thing left.