Dawn is a Woman's Name

by Christy Prahl

High season behind us
means it’s safe
to visit the lake again.

 Gone the noisy children
 and sandwich crusts
 left behind for the terns.

This morning,
 a hoar frost
provokes an earlier version of me.

Flesh, frozen breath,
the buff of my skin.

 Here, with the eyelid
 of the tide pulled back,
 mist rises from the body
 of the shore.

Ghosts tether to the last of the dark.
Felled trees. Hazy tintype

of stolen loves
where water meets the sand.

 And what color,
 that pink to the east?

My nephew might say carnival sugar.
My brother—his father—
the fiberglass panels

 curled back from the eaves in the attic.

 But this is the pink of my own regret
calling to mind the breasts of certain birds,

an open belly just after sex,
and the curious, aching majesty
 of my aloneness.