Love Letter

by Zachary Lundgren

Out of love and out of beer
we drove around a cold October
dusk, looking for girls
who never called. In these woods,

there were no sirens
so we hunted down dirt roads
through oaks and hickory angry
in red and orange. Dimming,

the branches noosed dead air
of light. We wanted to talk
about what it meant to be lonely,
but instead we talked about County

and the game on Friday, the odds
of a win. We drove until the headlights
caught the side of the road a dead white-tail
buck. We didn’t know what to do with it

so we kept it and drove into town, passed
the house of a girl we both knew. We left
the buck on her doorstep, antlers askew
and forward, like asking for a kiss.

We were boys. We didn’t know how
to love–we just knew
the weight of dead things
 

Zachary Lundgren received his MFA in poetry from the University of South Florida and his BA in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder and grew up in northern Virginia. He has had poetry published in several literary journals and magazines including The Louisville Review, The Portland Review, Barnstorm Journal, The Adirondack Review, and the University of Colorado Honors Journal.