Not a Newsletter on Intercourse

no it's really not

I did not write this morning because I started sliding my pitchfork through piles of sheep shit at 7am and it felt nice, peaceful. So I didn’t stop.

I’ve been very invested in Arcadia by Lauren Groff—a novel set in western New York State that tells the story of a 50 member commune turning into a 900 member “trippie hippie” commune in the course of over a decade, all told by a kid who has only known that. Novels have me less interested these days (and honestly frustrated—the cause of my pause on poetry). But this one has gripped me.

There is a paragraph that caused me to take a deep breath in, a good breath, over the fact that there are words to jumble up in our mouth and some people have the ability to jumble them up so perfectly, so truthfully. Here it is. It’s about intercourse. ‘Amen to that, Abe says, and there is a look between his parents that make Bit thrill with embarrassment. Sex is a tornado that suddenly smashed him a year ago. It is a whistle too high for human ears, and he awoke one morning a dog. He finds it everywhere, especially where it dismays him: in the budging, dripping cheesecloths in the Soy Dairy, enormous mammaries; in the slide of a pitchfork through compost like the half-nasty mechanism of intercourse.”

I’m not writing, or at least not planning to write, a newsletter on intercourse. But here is a mini newsletter on intercourse, anyway. It’s called This is a Newsletter on Intercourse. One time somebody, while laughing triumphantly at the sheer hilarity, said to me, If you’re a lesbian that means you’re a virgin, right? And I, who is scared of women in their 40-50s, still said No that is not what that means. And she puckered up, wild that somebody would correct her and said, Well that’s what you’re here for—so you can teach me! This mini newsletter now has to end, for may reasons. But don’t say that to people. Also I don’t identify as “a lesbian”. Also sex can be a kiss on a nose or however you define it. Also since when do you know everyone’s genitalia. Also my sex is not your business. End mini newsletter.

I could write so many newsletters.

I met some new people the other day, Sunday night, and they were asking Addie and I questions and we were answering and I had to wonder what my life sounds like to other people. I didn’t even have to ask them before they said, Your lives sound so fun, so adventurous.

I’m sure we just hit the right demographic, but it still got me thinking about the way we see each other. You sketch your life out to any person who knows how to listen and it seems impossible that you’ve done everything in that one lifetime—what with divorces, a complicated mother, 4 moms, Memphis, DC, Holland but not the Netherlands. Now Oregon with a whole bunch of parenthesis: Lincoln, Ashland, communes, gardens, rich people who fly you to other countries, evil boys on playgrounds, holes in walls and ants in tubs. How? And the days—mostly sore necks, dishes, a pitchfork through sheep shit, delicious cherry tomatoes and spitting cherry pits into what must be, “a thousand layers of bushes,” according to the 4 year old you love and took time to love.

That’s not even all of it. Of course not. Not anything we think we know is just that. Not about each other anyway. There are always more worlds, more portals, more sentences to fill the palm of who we are, what the world is. And a lot of it is heartbreaking.

Sometimes I tell the kid I spend my days with that I have good news and bad news. This makes her laugh and makes her more willing to do the “bad news things” which are just, hey brush her teeth kid or you got to go to bed now or something else that is World Ending for a kid.

The bad news is that the world is bad and the good news is that the world is good. I guess that is what these newsletters are. There is a whole lot of everything. Sometimes you explain your own everything to someone else and it will transform, right in front of you, to a spinning spiral of astonishment that we leapt out of the ocean all those years ago and here we are, dizzy over what we’ve become. I’m dizzy. Are you? Can you believe we just keep spinning? Can you believe we have libraries and strawberries and bottles of bubbly liquid that we can drink? So much zigzagging, crying, moaning, flying with man-made wings, melting cheese on chips. So much of it all. And someone asks you about your everything and you will easily fail to mention your brother’s sparkly gray eyes or all the hands you’ve held or the way music makes you blush.

That is all to say that I did not write a newsletter this morning. So much is coming in and out of my life that it’s hard to keep track of the whereabouts of myself and my dreams. Writing is a dream and I do it once a week, at least. That is good news.

I hope you all have some good news this week. I hope you somehow explain more of your everything to someone you love or find a pile of sheep shit to stab. Any other shit works too. It feels great.

This was not a newsletter on intercourse.

Love,

Jo