Synthetic Love, by Lisa Fay Coutley
I. In England
In case the car starts on fire
while he’s hang gliding, Everard
pins a note to his love’s chest
so no one dies trying to save her.
After their morning fuck, she lies
with her sleeping face on
while he winds the clock
in his dead mum’s room.
II. In Michigan
Synthetic love activist Davecat
just wants to rub his wife’s feet
in early morning light, but organic
women are not constant. Shi-chan is
the anchor that keeps him stable
in their room above his parents’
garage. When he crates his wife
to be shipped for repair, he kisses
both hands & cries he’ll miss her.
III. In Virginia
Gordon has three guns & two girls / one of which fires as fast as you can / pull the
trigger. A woman in stilettos / & a thong is meat someone else has / chewed & spit back
on God’s plate. / He wants his dolls buried / in the same box as him / so they can become
one dust.
IV. In California
Slade the repairman’s running out of vaginas
& teeth again. Sex is almost like a violent act, he
says, but these dolls can take a lot of physical abuse.
V. In Texas
Michael is grateful for his harem
of eight top-heavy dolls & the Swedes
who are willing to sell real pubic hair
for when his ladies wear out. In this high
form of masturbation he does not want
to be seen as a pervert, but when he
wakes at 3am with a raging hard-on
he goes to the garage, grabs his doll
of choice, & goes at it. You can’t do that
with a woman, he notes. She can say no.
VI. At Abyss Creations, USA
Receptionist Debbie says men are fifty
& balding & never going to get women
who look like this, who totally love them.
Doll Creator Matt feels best about men
who’ve made that emotional connection—
I’ve changed their lives for the better...like insoles
in their shoes. These men come home from work
excited to see their doll, & the food bill’s way cheaper.
*Language in italics is dialogue taken from the documentary Guys and Dolls.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). She’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose and poetry appears in Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, NELLE, Terrain, and Waxwing. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska Omaha.