Cowl

It may look like rubber to you

Like pointy little bat ears

Like it’s hard to turn my neck.

To me it’s more than a mask

It’s a security blanket

Filled with tears because MY PARENTS ARE DEAD.

And blood, but not my blood.

Joker’s blood

From that time I punched him in the ear.

Cowl cowl cowl

Fowl fowl fowl

Penguin wears a suit and I do too

Are we so different, he and I?

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

That hides my face so the tears can flow.

Catwoman

Selina Kyle

Kelina Syle

Mrooooow

Sly Ky, won’t you lick my face?

With your sandpapery tongue?

Lick clean my festering wounds

The surface ones, from when The Riddler

Trapped me in that shark tank and I got bit

And the underneath ones, because MY PARENTS ARE DEAD.

We two dark creatures of the night

Nocturnal something or others

Oh, how you rend my heart

With your mighty cat claws.

I just wish you’d stop stealing shit.

Ode to Gotham

Like a dark twisted metal womb

I emerged from you, naked and bleating

I gnaw at the umbilical cord

But Gotham, you won’t release me!

GOTHAM WHY

Are your insane asylums so easy to break out of?

GOTHAM WHY

Do you keep your stores of gold in above-ground safes?

GOTHAM WHY

Can’t you have better security lighting installed near the docks?

Gotham, you are my curse and savior and father and mother

Because MY ACTUAL PARENTS ARE DEAD.

Superman Sucks

Superman? Pff.

Whatever.

With your big dumb muscles

And your big dumb sexy hair curl

And your gleaming city of gold.

I get Killer Croc, you get a giant planet-eating alien.

I get Man-Bat, you get a billionaire super-genius,

Hell-bent on world domination.

Sometimes I perch on a gargoyle high above Gotham

And think to myself, “Superman, if you had a cowl,

It’d be made of unicorn pelt.”

But I still feel you, man.

Because there’s one very important thing we have in common.

Something that inexorably binds our souls

From whence we derive guilt and pain, but also strength

And that is, of course…

We both know The Flash totally sucks.

…AND ALSO BOTH OUR PARENTS ARE DEAD.

A Haiku for Al-Ghul

Ra’s, why is your name

So hard to spell, and why is

Your mustache so smooth?

–Katie Sisneros