I should have known better
than sneaking into the basement

and rounding them up with a stick,
but my parents were smashed

dinner plates, so I came, bearing
a plastic baggie of turkey scraps,

a soap dish oozing gravy, held up
cranberry sauce and said the word

kran-ber-ee. I told them stories
of Pilgrims and bobbing for apples,

of peace pipes and blankets infected
with smallpox. I didn’t think

they’d succumb to our customs,
offering not only the shrink-wrap

off their backs, but the very skin,
igniting their limbs like Roman

candles, until the rest of us began
to look unpatriotic in the strange light

of their exploding appendages,
and even my illiterate neighbor,

who couldn’t read, saw how
that spelled the end of Thanksgiving.