I’m glad I didn’t off myself because today I got a ticket to Isabelle Huppert. Same-day, fifteen Euros, an eighty-minute monologue by Mary Queen of Scots. I’ve always liked dark spaces, benches shared with foreign strangers. I dislike Dad jokes and too many throw pillows, flat screen televisions in soft-lit bars. Isabelle wound herself white on white, her corset coughing up Stuart red. Adieu, ma mère. Adieu, la France. I understood little and loved it all, thought that was how to live my life. Mes mains, mes amis, are stronger than they look. My father bequeathed a deadly grip.

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Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with recent contributions to The Baffler, Fence, Oversound, The Hopkins Review, Current Affairs, Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, LARB, and other outlets. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press, and she is a 2023 nominee for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.