Sipping bourbon in the dark, one friend says she’s taken a much younger lover, his chest smooth and sinuous as river rock. Another rubs testosterone on her breasts each night. A third has lost all interest in flesh, her own or anyone else’s.

flickering of novenas 
a glimpse 
of décolletage 

I tell them about the man who accused me of seduction, who insisted that the fire in my hearth was as clear a signal as if I’d unbuttoned his fly. His therapist, he tells me, agrees.

Does fire equal sex? I ask my friends. They all burst into laughter. Maybe, says one. But maybe not, whispers another. I watch as the candlelight illuminates their red mouths, their wet pink tongues, their glittering animal eyes.

sky aflame with stars 
somewhere in the night 
a vixen’s scream 

Eve Müller

lives in Eugene, Oregon with her sweetheart. She is the author of two books published by Plan B Press: Guide to the Ruins, a lyrical memoir (2024), and Birds and Saints (2025), a book-length poem about Rajneesh Puram, the cult that emerged in the Oregon desert in the 1980s. Her writing has also been published in About Place; Camas Magazine; Contemporary Haibun Online; Empty House Press; Marrow Magazine; Pine Hills Review; Sea Wolf Journal; Sequestrum; Thimble Literary Magazine; and Timberline Review among others; and appears in the anthologies Bookstore Clerks & Significant Others (Tsunami Press Anthology Series, Volume 1; 2023), and River Road: The Anthology: Volume One (released in January 2026 to celebrate nine years, 2014–2023, of the River Road Reading Series in Eugene, Oregon).

Müller was awarded a PLAYA artists’ residency in 2024 and won a Cirque poetry competition for “Tableau Vivants” (Vol. 15, No. 1, 2025). Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. When Eve is not writing, she bakes, hikes, conducts research on autism, hangs out with her mom and two feral daughters, and skinny-dips whenever/wherever she can.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Cezanne in New York, CNF by Eve Müller in Sea Wolf Journal (10 April 2026)

⚡ As If I Were a Meadow/Antonietta, poem by Eve Müller in Thimble Literary Magazine (Vol. 8, No. 3, Winter 2025)

⚡ Murmuration, an excerpt from Müller’s book-length poem Birds and Saints in marrow magazine (Issue 10, June 2024)

⚡ Notes from My Father’s Bedside, CNF in Thieving Magpie (Issue 17, Spring 2022)