Jason Gallagher

Open Fridges

On the typical episode, I would watch
Punky Brewster play in the tree
House behind the fence of
Her Chicago walk-up. Without fail, she would encounter 
the Maytag, or Kenmore, that her friend, Cherri,
Had seen the sanitation workers
Bring to the alley behind their building.
Brandon, the dog, would climb in
And Punky's friend, Alan,
All dimples, lisp and blonde
Mop-top would try to convince
Punky and Cherri that it was a
Pirate ship, or an Indy car.
Fifteen minutes, and
Two commercial breaks, later, I saw Alan,
Always Alan, thanking
Chicago's finest, as they
Extracted him from his tomb.
I thought I had learned the
Lesson those first responders taught him.
The moustached firefighter would look
Straight into the camera
Reminding us viewers that we should not
Play in, or around, abandoned appliances.
“You could suffocate and die.”
But today, while teaching,
I projected a picture of
A lone green fridge in an
Abandoned warehouse on the blackboard
and I felt the need for suffocation.
I felt the need
To jump in like Alan to
Punky's horror.

Jason Gallagher was a contributing editor at Evergreen Review. He is a member of The Unbearables poetry collective and has had work appear in The Otter as well as in the Kind of a Hurricane Press anthologies The Seasons and Storm Cycle, the first two issue of Post[blank], The Pangolin Review, Tribes, The Santa Clara Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. He has also had his book reviews published in Sensitive Skin, Gainsayer and The Otter. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife, fellow poet, Brendaliz Guerrero, and works as an adjunct English instructor at Maryville University while attending the Masters of Fine Art in Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.