“KM4” Poems & Drawings by Tom Sleigh and Michael Hafftka

At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air

and hangs there beautiful and repulsive.

Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds

don’t stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat

wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound—

the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out

as you go round and round the roundabout

at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the CASSPIR

are all pretending to be dead.

The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses,

Hey, can’t you get my flak jacket adjusted

so it doesn’t crush my collar?

Leaves softly undulating, little waves of leaves undergoing shifts

between astral blue and green, leaves always breaking on leaves

in the little breeze that the CASSPIR passing stirs in the heat—

stirring the memory of putting your fingers

in the wounds of a blast wall at KM4 as if you were

doubting Thomas waiting for Christ to appear:

thumb-sized holes for AK-47s,

fist-sized for twenty caliber, both fists for fifty.