Deep in Our Refrigerator

By Jack Prelutsky b. 1940 Jack Prelutsky

Deep in our refrigerator,

there's a special place

for food that's been around awhile . . .

we keep it, just in case.

“It's probably too old to eat,”

my mother likes to say.

“But I don't think it's old enough

for me to throw away.”

It stays there for a month or more

to ripen in the cold,

and soon we notice fuzzy clumps

of multicolored mold.

The clumps are larger every day,

we notice this as well,

but mostly what we notice

is a certain special smell.

When finally it all becomes

a nasty mass of slime,

my mother takes it out, and says,

“Apparently, it's time.”

She dumps it in the garbage can,

though not without regret,

then fills the space with other food

that's not so ancient yet

Text © 2000 Jack Prelutsky. Used by Permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: It's Raining Pigs and Noodles (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2000)

Biography

Jack Prelutsky is a creator of inventive poems for children and adults alike. He served as the Poetry Foundation’s Children’s Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008. Prelutsky grew up in the Bronx, and when he was young he studied classical music; though he gave up pursuing a career as an opera singer to concentrate on writing, he continues to sing.

In a Scholastic.com interview, when asked where his ideas come from, Prelutsky said, . . .

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