Nooners by Eileen G’Sell


Let me be your Elizabeth Warren. Your wristwatch glints (but I don’t watch watches). My “escort” body adores the conceptual art you made and hung over the bed. I love the idea of you (alone) with pink construction paper, of you with (heavy duty) scissors doing anything with a shred of rage. Your fantasy of a midday round-armed-sofa-bound bukkake? So autumn 2012. I will always be angrier than you could guess. I will always know what time it is. Resplendent as words you can’t possibly mean, redundant as sex in your native tongue, it makes sense that I’m the one who would mouth the hour’s instructions, who would show you how perfectly to pronounce the word “boss”.

Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with regular contributions to LARB, Hyperallergic, DIAGRAM, the Boston Review, and other outlets. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018, and in 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and for the Prison Education Project at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.