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Me as Lemon



   


Me as lemon      seed
Me as
        lady with brain
        grief


Me as contagion

        as  cave
        cookfire
        driptorch

        handful of things almost holding.

Me as
        Derrida, who stepped from
        the bathroom to see a cat looking at him.

Are animals in the first circle of removal or are they inside of us?

Me as

        one of Kafka’s girls in Titorelli’s attic,
        the eucalyptus in their constant state of undress.

Me     borrowing against future happiness.

Me as

        bicycle, crawling out to Black Earth
        working all my muscle into the wind.

        nothing happened.
        blue skin because guardrail, peaches.

When we look at a thing, what is it that stares back at us?
Carolyn Orosz lives and writes in Vermont. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2025 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship and a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant. Her writing has also been supported by MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She currently serves as a poetry reader for New England Review.