Size / / /

Out in the suburbs on Saturday night

The workaday Batman gets drunk and starts fights

Costume too tight around midriff and ass

The Batmobile running on unleaded gas

Batts has been living out of the back seat

Since Missus Batman threw him into the street

The Batdoor no longer accepts the Batkey

The Batcredit card's maxed out permanently

The Batkids are staying with BatNan and Pop

The beers keep on coming and no-one says stop

Once a hero to someone, there's none left to ask,

And failure's invisible under a mask

But with each tilt of beer glass we see plain old Bruce:

Middle aged; hopes forgotten; expecting abuse

And when the bar's closed and we're facing the dawn,

Batman of suburbia passes out on the lawn




Lee Battersby is the multi-award winning author of over 60 short stories and poems in the US, Europe, and Australia. His collection 'Through Soft Air' was released by Prime Books in 2006. He lives in Western Australia, and maintains a weblog at http://battersblog.blogspot.com.
Current Issue
18 May 2026

Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve. 
My grandmother slit my father’s bones and let them fly with yeast.
the nightingale was caught in a net / and brought to a lab for further study.
Wednesday: Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley 
Friday: The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png 
Issue 11 May 2026
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By: Athar Fikry
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
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Issue 9 Mar 2026
By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Strange Horizons
2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
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