


Jellied Moments of Disjecta Membra by Jack Phillips
Though poetry for us is a communal act the pandemic has rendered it a solitary affair of disjecta membra so this morning from a friend came a fragment and it reads
to be understood, it must be experienced as a type of jelly
and taking the form of a one-line haiku or an American sentence after the manner of Ginsberg it is so so true in so many ways for rhubarb (that tartness may have a say) for salamanders (that they may breathe and slink and breed and be) for marrow for the baking dog biscuits and for those who spread it on toast as marmalade.
An excellent morning poem and wildly born brings the poet and the reader to that jellied moment of generativity somewhere between the crust of reality and the goo that makes it go or perhaps it came to him as he lost his swamp-shoe in the soft bottom or recalled the time I dared him to eat the green gunk in a bean-pod or maybe and most likely beneath the slickering velocity of Vallonia pulchella or snail of another sort or slug.
*Becoming a Naturalist, Part 57. Poetic fragment by Joe Janowski.