By Claire Kortyna

stark, honed form, hunkered down, waiting.

This week I write until hunger sickens me:

roils of nausea, black-spotted vision.

At five p.m.: melt into the couch, hibernate the remaining day.

Here is what the leaves say when they arrive:

Here is where we hold joy in our bodies:

Here is how joy feels:

A cat’s paw on a laser beam

on rainbows refracted through the prism in my bedroom window

Here are things the cat catches:

Here are things never caught:

The cat dies, the prism breaks

If you want to find something, stop looking

Where do we hold joy in our bodies? Can we say how it feels?

When I try to make you feel mine, what am I missing?

How do I hold it against your skin? Me,

who only vaguely remembers.

Remind me what I forgot:

of the rising, welling,

of something in the gut

of a tension that releases

of the lifting at the base of your skull

remind me of leaves.

Claire Kortyna's work has been published in Blood Orange Review, The Maine Review, The Baltimore Review, Jellyfish Review and others. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She reads for The Cincinnati Review. Her twitter handle is: @ckortyna