A title like "Turkey day" promises a holiday table, a crowd, a carving knife. Dave Bonta gives six short lines instead, and they turn the meal inside out. The poem is about appetite, and about how uneasily the eater and the eaten sit side by side. Its central idea is that devouring is never one-way. The bird on the table is also a guest, a body with breath in it, and the wanting that drives the meal belongs to the same cycle.
The first couplet sets the hunger going: "I fit myself / for the wing of want." The verb is strange. We fit a key to a lock, or a garment to a body, so the speaker seems to be tailoring himself to his own desire. "Wing" works on several levels. It is the cut of meat someone reaches for at dinner, and the limb that lifts a bird off the ground. It can also be a section of a house, a place you enter. "Want" means both desire and lack, so the wing is a place of hunger and emptiness as much as of wishing. Even before the turkey appears, the speaker has made himself an instrument of appetite.
Then the bird arrives, and it is not a normal bird: "an infinite fowl / filled with blood and whistle." "Infinite" lifts the turkey out of the oven and makes it something closer to a mythic creature, an emblem of every animal ever eaten. The word "filled" is a quiet joke, because a roast turkey is usually filled with stuffing. Here the filling is "blood and whistle," which is life and breath. A turkey is better known for gobbling than whistling, so the choice nudges the bird toward song or spirit. There is also an old idiom that calls the throat the "whistle," as in wetting your whistle, and that links the image back to eating and drinking. The bird is stuffed with the very things dinner is meant to remove.
The last couplet shifts the picture again: "who dined with us at home / ate to be eaten." The pronoun "who" is the sharpest move in the poem. We say "which" for a dish and "who" for a person, so the turkey is promoted from food to company. It sits at the table, at home, among family. The tense matters too. The first couplet is in the present, with the speaker still preparing, while the rest is in the past tense of a meal already finished. That gives the poem the feel of a memory in which the hunger has been fed, but not settled. The final line, "ate to be eaten," can be read in more than one way. The bird may have been fattened to become food, or it may have shared the meal knowingly. The line also hints that every eater is food in waiting. I would call that an inference, but the grammar invites it, and it recalls the logic of sacrifice, in which the thing consumed is honoured as it is consumed.
The construction is spare, and it suits the idea. There are three unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters except the lone "I." Nothing closes a sentence, so the poem flows like one long swallowed breath. The lines are short, two or three stresses each, and the sound does the work that rhyme would do. "Wing," "want," "who" and "with" share a breathy w. "Fowl," "filled" and "fit" echo one another across the first four lines, and "infinite" even seems to contain the opening "fit." The last line then folds back on itself. "Ate" and "eaten" are the same verb at two ends of the sentence, with "to be" between them, so the grammar loops like the cycle it describes. It is also the shortest, most compact line, and it lands like a click.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it unsettles with so little. It never preaches about meat or gratitude, and it never says whether the speaker is guilty, thankful or simply hungry. It lets a few well-chosen words, "infinite," "whistle," "who," do the arguing. A holiday we associate with abundance and comfort turns into a small, strange ritual in which wanting, feeding and being fed all blur together. After the poem ends, the ordinary sentence "we ate dinner" never quite sounds innocent again.