photo by Caroline Van Tiggelen

---

 

Abandoned Face

An alcove in the wooded mountains holds a shack
left alone through time because we’re too busy/new/
scared of what’s inside our pasts, because in there
is a face that’s sprayed in paint can art, so distorted
by youthful exuberance that it looks exactly like
us. There’s no mirror here—in the seldom touched
land above our cities—to distort us into beautiful images
of ourselves as we would have us seen. No, this wall
is a mirror to bursting pipelines and junkyards full of cars,
to smog around skyscrapers on fracked land, to greed
and speed. This face painted on a wall is our reality of past
and future alike, so we write on the wall adjacent to it
in the hieroglyphics of our time to remind ourselves that we did
this, we made and left a humble abode in the wooded
backcountry of a mountainous region as a conquering
flag left by a civil army despite having never succeeded
in its conquest. Let our symbols on the walls stand longer
than those walls as a beacon of pioneer warning for
wildlife to read for their amusement when time no longer
makes a ticking sound. You, painted face with a toothy smile,
be less sinister that we might heed your warning.

 

---

Kirk Pfotenhauer likes to eat pizza with pineapple and black olives. He spent over a quarter of his life in college and accidentally got a degree. He now spends his days on a farm upstate. The state is Colorado and he’s not up it too much, but it sounds nice.