batman never fights crime where he's needed
hey batman
why don't you come over to
my side of the tracks
for a change.
my neighbour's a junkie,
the guy downstairs sits
with a gun in his lap,
and no one will deliver
pizza after dark.
are you afraid
that someone will steal your hub caps?
First published in sign language (1998)
Also published in
The Listener (1999)
About Paula
Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency in 2018.
Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Passages North, Barren, New Ohio Review, SWWIM, Gulf Coast, The Spinoff, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Aotearotica. Her essays have been published in The Sun, Passages North, The Spinoff and Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press).
She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric.