Anna Pulley - The Lesbian Sex Haiku Book (with Cats!)

In 2010, the girl I planned to marry dumped me. I had proposed to her nine months earlier, on the Isle of Lesbos, in Skala Eresou, where Sappho was born, in case were playing Whos the Gayest. She decided she wasnt into ladies as much as she originally had thought. (For the record, shes a lovely person, and we are good friends now, because part of the lesbian hexwhich affects even those who arent lifersinvolves remaining friends with your exes forever.) At the time, though, I was shattered. My chest was a brick, and I could do little besides cry-hyperventilate. I fantasized about getting hit by carsnot fatally so, just some light maimingso that my ex would have to come back and take care of me and then decide to grow old with me the way we originally had planned.

Also, my dad had been recently diagnosed with lung cancer, and my stepdad had a stroke, and my mom ended up being hospitalized as well due to the stress of it all. I had just started a new job (paid internship is a more accurate description) making about six dollars an hour in the most expensive city in the United States, a city I most certainly could not afford to live in on my own. It was not the greatest time to be dumped by my fiance, as far as those things go. And because of all these events, I couldnt write. I couldnt even journal. I peered at the stories of my life thus far and didnt recognize myself in any of themthey were like those dreams in which you wake up and remember nothing but the feeling they inspired.

When I tried, my words would devolve into self-loathing expletives, like a fifth graders reenactment of a Martin Scorsese movie. But I was also contractually obligated to write for work. And by write, I mean tweet. So I did that, not just so I wouldnt get fired but also because it was strangely satisfying and required very little time commitment. Plus, it helped me avoid thinking about the emotional tsunami of suck that had become my life. A tweet, 140 characters.

A haiku, seventeen syllables. A task that small and manageable I could do. Anyone can write seventeen syllables, I told myself. And so I did. I wrote one every day for a year, just like how Ryan Goslings character wrote one letter every day for a year in The Notebook , because he was copying me. One of the first ones was this: Being on Twitter all day for work makes it hard to finish any.

And another: I face all my fears in yoga: flying, falling, farting in public. And another, and another. I wrote haiku until I no longer felt like I would die from ineptitude, or that my life was a huge cosmic mistake, particularly my hair and the errant incisor that made me appear to be always on the verge of toothing something. Not to get too Oprah one-thing-I-know-for-sure on you, but writing haiku was how I slowly re-raveled myself. I put my life back together three lines at a time. My healing process was aided by two things: (1) a handful of beautiful, unavailable women and (2) an unwavering belief that poetry would make those women want to have sex with me.

Of course this strategy failed a lot of times. (How often? Its not like I counted. Fourteen.) But it also worked a great many times too. It led to a four-year sexy-romance-heart-tumble-thing with a married woman who lived on the other side of the country. We wrote a lot of haiku to each other. Hundreds of them.

It also led to a one-night stand with a straight girl I met on Twitter. It led to two fuck buddies developing feelings for each other and ceasing to fuck me (see Chapter 5, How Lesbian Sex Works). It led me to bars (see Chapter 2, How to Pick Up a Lesbian) and sex parties and sex dungeons and spectacular rejections and spectacular hangovers and some truly amazing friendships (see Chapter 8, My Ex Is Your Ex), and eventually it led to a fantastic girlfriend who did not balk at all when I suggested we do a book together whereby she would draw cats in various states of lesbian anxiety (see Chapter 4, U-Hauling). WHATS A HAIKU, ANYWAY? Our attention spans are getting shorter. Blame ADHD or the Internet if you must, but the truth of the matter is not much can hold our attention for long, even when its about topics dear to our hearts, such as love, Nutella, or cunnilingus. This is why haiku was inventedto give our short-form brains something else to do when we arent photographing dogs wearing leggings.

The word haiku has been around since the nineteenth century, but it has appeared in other variations since as far back as the ninth century, when people had to actually memorize things in order to impress anyone. What is a haiku, you ask? Its a form of poetry that the Japanese invented and that we Westerners graciously stole from them and changed ever so slightly to fit our language wonkiness. We mostly think of haiku as seventeen-syllable poems, in the 5-7-5 format, that look like this: I like poetry, flowers, and waterfalls. Im a haiku genius! Japanese haiku isnt based on syllables, however. Its based on onji , which are units of sound that dont correlate with English very well. The Haiku Society of America (which is a thing that exists!) explains, in a somewhat exasperated manner, that haiku isnt a type of fixed form poetry (like a sonnet, for instance) and that people should just get over the rigid 5-7-5 format already, because they were probably tired, as I was, of getting into Twitter fights with people over syllables.

That said, I tried to adhere to this format when I could in this book because its what most of us think of when we think of haiku, and because, like most lesbians, I am a pleaser. In the West, haiku was popularized in the 1960s by writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, though the trend was soon superseded by enthusiasm for hipsters, zombies, and vampires, per our collective cultural boner for brainless dead things that sparkle and drink PBR. WHATS A LESBIAN, ANYWAY? Like haiku and poetry in general, lesbians (and bisexuals, trans folk, queers, genderqueers, tenderqueers, heteroflexibles, and all womyn-loving wimmin) are frequently misunderstood. Sure, you may have read about them once in a Womens Studies class, glimpsed them on Greys Anatomy or in the plaster aisle at Home Depot, but its a rare thing indeed to experience queer women in the wild. Who are these mythical beings? What do they do? What do they wear now that hipsters have appropriated flannel? How do they meet? Is it true that lesbians move in together after the second date? Is there a man in such relationships? And if so, can it be me? What does Rachel Maddow have that I dont? These are some of the questions you may have. This book aims to dispel myths, to enlighten, to demystify, to remystify, to gently chide, and to perplex your parents, all in the most straightforward medium available to humankind.

But first, a caveat! I am not out to speak for every queer lady. The following haiku are by no means trying to capture the lesbian experience, because there isnt oneit differs for every queer lady. I realize also that not every queer-identified person subscribes to female pronouns or female sex parts. I totally support that, but for ease and clarity, I decided to keep it simple. In fact, if you dont like a pronoun or genital reference, feel free to scratch it out and use whatever feels comfortable to you. I dont mind.