imprints of summer

left on me like beautiful scars
freckles and blonde hair
and two grass stains on the knees
of my new favorite jeans

there’s a certain smell to the air
but I don’t know what it is,
when the nights feel like the days
we can spend all our time
carving pictures so blue and endless

into each other’s eyes

we stare and lounge away
the most precious hours of our lives
forgetting that we’ll look back
and smile sadly
on sunburns satisfied by lemonade sweet lips

I walk into the fall
alone,
with a limp,
you no longer hurt
but it’s a little difficult to move
and breathe correctly,
now just an old wound I’m learning
to live with

I can live without you
only if you promise this won’t
be the last time
that I peel these shoulders new again

_______________________________________________________

looking up

all things grow toward the sky,
the greatest open door
I’ve ever seen,
loose hinges and the horizon
pulling the eyes from me

and possibility, and hope,
all just songs
that occasionally get caught
on repeat
on my knees my knees my knees
I’m a little closer to the grass

all my friends were interred
on mountains,
rivers talking way too fast
or valleys flat as my back
during my very first heart attack

good thing I’ve still got her smiling face
that’s on her head
buried in tangles of grass and brown hair
I wouldn’t even know what tomorrow
looks like,
let alone how to live it

Zachary Lundgren is a creative writing student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is earning his BA, and then hopes to continue on to graduate school (hopefully somewhere warmer), and thinks it’s funny how our bodies are badly designed, poorly put together vessels, harboring these diminishing, so-called ‘vital organs,’ I hope my heart goes first.