September 14, 2015 | Occasus | Issue 5 | Fiction

Haikus on Selected Real Life Sexual Encounters

B.L.
            He had purple hair
            and a record collection
            but no turntable.
J.P.
            A summer romance:
            We had sex in a canoe
            and it fucking sucked.
M.L.
            A wealthy surname.
            He only drank Perrier
            and waxed…everything.
B.B.
            My favourite story:
            He asked me to leave so he
            could feed his gecko.
C.F.
            A guitar player
            who wrote me a ballad called
            “Blonde Hair, Little Tits”
A.M.
            We were studying.
            One thing led to another
            and then he went home.
G.G.
            I found out later
            He was from West Virginia--
            not Spain as he claimed.

The Men in My Life from November 15th-November 20th 2015

Saturday
            A man at work saw my nose piercing and said
            “Why ruin a pretty face like yours?”
            Giving him the finger behind closed doors
            wasn’t as satisfying as I hoped it would be.
Sunday
            My lunch break at the mall
            seems to always fall at the same time as Santa Claus’s.
            Santa Claus eats pre-packaged sushi and smokes Du Mauriers.
Monday
            Sam’s beard feels like Velcro and I think:
            I wish we were Velcro.
            He would be the prickly side and I would be the fuzzy side and when we’d pull
            apart from each other we’d revel in the ‘chhhhhhre’ sound
            but then be sad because we’d be apart.
Tuesday
            Zander’s father has the face of a frog and the memory of a goldfish.
            I’ve been living with his son for three years
            and he still calls me Nicole.
Wednesday
            I bought a used copy of Peter Pan from Goodwill.
            The inscription read: “To my beautiful daughter,
            Never grow up.
            Love, pops”
            Pops is setting himself up for disappointment.
Thursday
            I don’t know how to use the can opener and had to wait two hours for Matt to
            come home so I could eat my soup.
            It was the most depressing bowl of Homestyle Chicken Noodle I’ve had
            to date.

Spider Legs

2004
            I don’t forgive you
            for pulling the legs off of that spider.
            The way he (or she) writhed and popped
            made me think of he (or she) as being a he (or she)
            and not an it.

            I don’t forgive myself
            for letting you shove your tongue in between my chapped lips.
            It didn’t feel like Amy from French class said it would
            but I said I liked it:
            the prelude to an orchestra of fake orgasms.

2009
            I haven’t forgotten
            how it felt to lie:
            having a hand-rolled cigarette in a warm bathtub,
            wondering who will kill me first
            and who will kill me second.

            You haven’t forgotten
            how I look undressed.
            Chicken pox scars and freckle formations and hidden
            tattoos.  “Do you know her,
            or do you know know her?”

2014
            I still worry
            that I wore the wrong outfit to your funeral.
            How fucking selfish, right?
            My blouse had butterflies on it
            and I thought it was symbolic.

            You still worry
            that you will be forgotten--
            that ten years of us wasn’t enough.
            Our stories don’t rival the Bible’s,
            but I’ll scribe them on rolling papers.

NATALIE FRANKE is a Toronto-based writer, film theory student, and Oxford comma user.