Eve Müller
Shrapnel
My daughter’s body unsettles me with its stillness. Her eyes closed. Her skin a palest green beneath hospital light. The technician tells me to remove her jewelry before she is fed into the black mouth of the MRI. I carefully take off ear, nose, and eyebrow rings, the stud that bisects her tongue, delicate as a cat’s.
Unconscious, she allows me these intimacies.
I hold her jewels in my hand, watch for beat of blood at the bend in her arm, listen for the small machine of her heart. With a flick of the switch, the MRI roars into action. Swallows her up. Long enough to imagine a world barren without her spit and fury, without her words that cut through bone.
her face
unforgetting
my slap
About the Author
Eve Müller has recently published in About Place, Camas, Marrow Magazine, Sequestrum, and Timberline Review among others. She has two books out: Guide to the Ruins and Birds and Saints. She was a winner in the Cirque poetry contest and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Very direct and feeling and spare and beautiful, with the many moving contrasts of a mother’s love. The title and the haiku artfully combine with and expand the sober, resonant prose, in unexpected ways. ”Shrapnel” is a harsh start, but resonates again at the end of the haibun–the shrapnel of the daughter’s jewelry; the shrapnel of human actions, like a slap; and the shrapnel of the words in the reader’s art-wounded mind. Thank you!