Hot Air

HANGKU,
or
FLYING FRIDGE FUN

By Pete Hammer (and friends)

Here in the off season, my thoughts drift back to those warm days of summer, and I find myself standing in the kitchen, trying to capture in simple words the hot, steamy, rising— Yes, have you ever noticed? No matter what the word set is, somehow, all the poems seem to end up about sex.

Or maybe that's just my circle of friends’ fridges...

To test this, I tried this theory on my girlfriend Terri.

“It’s inevitable,” I said, “isn’t all art about sex?”

“No,” she corrected me, “all art is about love.”

“Well,” I hedged, “same thing, in the world of refrigerator poetry. After all,” I went on, “it isn’t about refrigerators...”

So, what does this have to do with hang gliding, you ask? Well, what I realized then was that the second most-common poetic subject on my and my friends’ fridges is flying. Maybe because most of my friends hang glide... Not that any of it is ‘high art’, so-to-speak, or even any good as poetry; and nor should one expect it to be. There is after all the excuse that there’s only so much possible with the limited word set that comes in that little box—or boxes (they do seem to multiply—hmmm...) But the snippets that seem to stay up there on the fridge are heartfelt, in a proletarian, yearning, winter ground-bound sort of way.

So, here for your reading pleasure, is a sample of some of the juicier (flying) fragments from me and my friends’ fridges...

What’s on yours?