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Otto Falls on His Bike and His Knee is Bleeding



   


What will help you feel better?

I want to go see that dead mouse on the sidewalk again.
I want to pick a dead flower, so he can eat.

I want to hold that dead mouse’s tail—

No you can’t touch him.

Mama, we don’t hit the dead mouse.
Mama, we don’t bike over the dead mouse.

I will be careful, I will bring him home.

He is very still.

Death is a light. He turns toward it.







Anti-Terra
Fever Dream: Scientific Forest Management Area
Acts 9:5
Me as Lemon
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.