32 THE MISSOURI REVIEW • SUMMER 2019
Ghost Forest
As if resurrected, the trees
have returned: what’s left
of their once buried trunks now
jagging through beach sand.
We go at low tide so we
can see them,
into their hollows made by wind
and by water, following
the ancient rings, the swollen
wood, dark and soft,
something to flake with a tool
or fingernail.
In all the available spaces,
blue-gray stones,
the surprising white
of shattered shells,
Delicate, bone-like, barnacles
encase trunk after trunk,
like an erupted volcano or
extracted molar.
Farther north, in the outskirts
of Alaska’s archipelagos,
