I don't know if any of you have done this.
It used to be a more common thing
and I think to do where after Thanksgiving you would take
the wishbone out of the turkey.
It would, one person would grab one end
and you would grab the other to see whoever got their wish.
And this is "The Custom".
"Gravy sliced down to the bone.
Every year, all that's left of the Thanksgiving feast
is the wishbone.
Stained the color of tea or rain seeping into wood,
it could be beautiful.
A singular harp from which no one has learned to coax a tune,
or an ivory white bow of stars that never shot a wounding
shaft, but instead impelled a feathered being into the air.
A hinge for the drumming of earthly wings.
But the custom of the breastbone is that only two of you
can fight over this good fortune.
Only one of you can win.
So son Esau plucks the wishbone from the carcass,
son Jacob grabs the other end.
Sometimes the bone tears and twists apart as slowly
as the strings of DNA that bind you together,
the long fibers unraveling in your opposing grips.
Other times already brittle, it snaps
like the retort of a branch breaking
from the curse big tree.
Or the jawbone with which Samson slew so many Philistines.
Except for that one year when your mother hung
the disarticulated blessing to dry in the kitchen window,
then painting it red transformed the hollow and the skeleton
into a small sleigh for a velvet coated Santa Claus.
His cheerful gaze staring blindly through a decade
of Christmases.
It has been the custom to fight over the bones.
You've always tried to be the first
to grasp the better end, you and your Cain
or Abel torquing across the kitchen table
using the leverage of your bodies until one of you
is left triumphant clutching luck's fat knuckle,
the other it's splintery end"