Today’s reading turns the spotlight on poetry — specifically the gloriously silly world of Jack Prelutsky. We’re reading My Mother Says I’m Sickening, Forty Performing Bananas, My Brother Shaved His Teddy Bear, and A Pizza the Size of the Sun, four poems that share a common trick: take something ordinary and stretch it as far as it will go.

I shaped this episode around a “How Silly Can You Get?” arc — noticing the exaggeration in each poem, hearing how rhyme and rhythm carry the joke, and then trying the same trick ourselves: pick something ordinary, make it enormous, ridiculous, or impossible, and let the rhyme follow the fun.

Before recording, I made a small index-card collage — a bold yellow banana peeling open against a dark background, framed in my handmade red-and-black frame. It’s a direct wink to Forty Performing Bananas, and it set the tone for a reading that’s meant to be read out loud, with big voices and bigger laughs.

Watch the full episode and see how a pizza the size of the sun (and forty bananas doing tricks) can turn into your own poem.