it’s time to bring down Batman |
Issue 13
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your late arrival to mankind causes
nightly revolutions of the stars left as a memorial to your late father / white reveals right & you might be divine with how you play Gotham like a game of pinball / you don’t really care about the mouse in your house / you’re just a man taking a photo op with scales in one hand, your fingers crossed behind your back / you dole out your little samplings of justice in arcade tokens / you dabble in light immorality on Sundays you hedged your bets well, Mr. Wayne / if your longest relationship is with your bank account, make it a good one / you don’t care about how our houses rouse us at night-- how the pipes settle & resettle their debts against the wet breath of the furnace how everything is built on rats nests, mold stains & cobwebs / lead in the water turns to lead in our heads / you’re not aware of the ghost under the stairs or the nails from melted down swords visiting their rewards on each stubbed toe / a word of advice: leave one light on to cast a shadow for our common benefit / see the hand puppets plummet to their best deaths yet in alleys carpeted in broken glass & hashtags all anyone wanted here was a safe harbor among all the worn-out warnings-- it’s 10 pm, do you know where your progeny is? you kept them locked away like a finite resource / you are Arkham Asylum & we’re living rent free in your head |
Panika M. C. Dillon’s work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Copper Nickel, The Diagram, Steam Ticket, apt and others. She placed second for the 2024 Vivian Shipley Poetry Prize. She received her MFA in creative-writing poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and works as a legislative reporter at the Texas Capitol.
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