Here's the poem I almost died delivering last night at PVC:


Superman: A Murder

They wait a long time: the fifty women he saved, now growing old, still single, still wearing low-heeled rubber shoes and blouses with bows at the neck. They still only let down their hair at night, when they are in front of their lonely mirrors, they still leave their bedroom windows open just in case.

Eventually, their fingers get tired of the innocent sewing, the braiding and unbraiding, the window latch that always catches and bites. They get tired of waiting. The modest off-white blouses are the first to go – end up in landfills, in beach flotsam, in someone else’s umbrella. The shoes are abandoned in a park, in a movie theater, in the condiment isle at the supermarket. Their hair is cut short – bleached and bobbed and sprayed, stiff and sharp.

They start to leave messages for one another – blared from the megaphone of a circling truck, taped to telephone poles. They meet on roofs, in broom closets, on top of traffic lights. They start to plan. They sew a net, big enough, strong enough, and all of it, dazzling, spring-green kryptonite.