Witnessing, by Jennifer McGaha

On a lazy, last-gasp-of-summer sort of day, I linger on the patio of a south Asheville bakery. Leaning back in my chair, I marvel at the warmth, at the music drifting over from a nearby brewery, at my good fortune for having arrived here on what would have been, COVID notwithstanding, a perfectly normal Friday. Four days before, I had stood before my class for the first time since the pandemic began. Above their masks, my students were a cluster of startled eyes. In the long months we had been apart, we had forgotten one another, and the language with which I had learned to teach and they had learned to student no longer served us. An attendance policy? A late paper penalty? Ludicrous. COVID had shaped and shifted our narrative in ways we were just beginning to understand. 

Let’s crack the windows, I had said. So COVID can fly out the window. 

Of course, this was not how COVID worked, but this was creative writing, not biology. Still, even with our fondness for words, we had no adequate way to articulate our sorrows, not the collective horrors nor the smaller, everyday disappointments. Certainly, we couldn’t refer to them in the simple past tense. Nothing was simply over. Past perfect tense was not helpful, either: Before the pandemic, we had… What good did it do to remember what we did before? The future tense, too, was problematic: This spring I will … Who knew what would happen in the coming months? We could only speak definitively in the present tense, and first-person plural pronouns seemed most fitting: We are unsure how to proceed. And so we talked about our writing processes, about our fears and doubts and the struggle to begin.   

“I’m afraid that what I write won’t be good enough,” one student said.

In the old days, I might have offered reassurances, but as it were (subjunctive!), I offered only validation.  

“Oh, it won’t,” I said. “It absolutely won’t.”  

What sort of teacher was I to discourage a blossoming young writer? What sort of person? Still, there it was, an inescapable truth: Our words will never be enough. On the one hand, it was liberating. If we accepted the inevitability of failure, we were free to flounder around on the page, finding beauty where we could. On the other hand, beauty was so fleeting. Nonetheless, we tried to capture snippets where we could. We were reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, and at the beginning of each class we went around the room naming our delight for the day: A phone call from an old friend. A premium parking spot. A perfect cup of coffee. And now, for me, a new delight: Swedish creme.  

It’s like cheesecake, the man at the counter had told me when I ordered. But the delicacy the server places in front of me is as much like cheesecake as rain is like snow, as a flute is like a drum, which is to say that they vibrate differently in the body. Topped with strawberry purée, the thick custard I slurp from a spoon is creamy, yes, smooth, yes, comforting and familiar and exotic all at once—a moment unto itself. The creme glides down my throat, a heron landing on water, a sensation, a mood, and it is no longer late August but a random, uneventful spring day when nothing in particular happens but everything is about to happen, when daffodils dot the hillsides and the morning air still settles in your hips and mid-day sun hums with the promise of leisurely strolls and lakeside lounging, of outdoor concerts and sparkling rosé and charcuterie boards balanced on wobbly, makeshift tables. 

It is not the end of summer, the end of anything. The season of breathtaking, of basking, of rolling over on your back and exposing your pale, naked belly to the sun, has nearly arrived, the anticipation of which, in the way of things, is almost always sweeter than the thing itself— sweeter, even, than the memory of last summer, which even now surpasses my wildest expectations. I am not a reliable witness to anything, save the impotent beauty of words. 

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Jennifer is the author of two memoirs, Flat Broke with Two Goats (Sourcebooks, 2018) and Bushwhacking (forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2023). Her work has also appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, CHEAP POP, The Huffington Post, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Passengers, HerStry, Baltimore Fishbowl, and many other publications. A native of Appalachia, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, six unruly dogs, ten relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of crested hens. She currently teaches at UNC-Asheville.

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. 

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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.