Blackbird Archive“KM4” Poems & Drawings by Tom Sleigh and Michael Hafftka
Not English Somali Italian French the mouth
blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4
speaks in a language never heard before.
Not the Absolute Speaker of the News,
not crisis chatter’s famine/flame,
the mouth blown open at KM4
speaks in a language never heard before.
Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were,
the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces,
the mouth of smoke at KM4
mouths syllables of smoke never heard before.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eight books of poetry, including Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new book, Station Zed , is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015. He is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. Photo by Ed Robbins
Michael Hafftka’s paintings appear in the permanent collections of several museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, the McNay Art Museum, the Housatonic Museum of Art, the Arizona State University Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Yeshiva University Museum, and Chapman University’s Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art, among others. Hafftka lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Yonat Hafftka