Dawn's Early Light

          by Lydia Munz

We slept in drowning tents on the Calvert Cliffs,
clutching our shark and crocodile teeth
as if they were orthodox icons.

We pulled the sleeping bags up to our noses
humming the songs we wrote on the car ride
and wondered who had stayed there before us.

We believed in spirits, and I told them of the ghost,
Francis Scott Key’s son who frequents
a dueling ground on the shore of a river in my hometown.

They asked if my father haunted my garage.
I couldn’t answer because there was
a suspicious bust of Elvis Presley,
enshrined in gardening tools and dust.

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