Cocktail

If it weren’t for the fruit cocktail in heavy syrup, it would be easy to hate him. But once,  
though we were not close, and maybe he’d had a few, my brother-in-law told me about the time  
his mother left him and his twin sister home alone, went on a bender, how the nausea of hunger
drove them to climb the cabinets, how after eating the last sleeve of saltines, they found a can  
of Del Monte Fruit Cocktail, the glisten of fruit on the label so real they licked it.  
If there was only one ruby red cherry, they’d split it. But their four-year-old hands could not
work the can opener, so they got the idea to throw the can against the floor and the walls to try to
break it open. I don’t know how long they tried, if the dented silver lost its label, I know  
my sister met him on a New Hampshire beach years later, how after the children came,  
he’d leave on a bender from time to time and when he didn’t, they’d wished he would, fatigued  
by the boast and brag of him, his thin plans to make it big, his phony injuries and lawsuits, and
worse. He calls once a year or so, looking for something, his cadence speaking louder than
words, but they hang up. We don’t know where he is now, or his twin, but I picture him
sleeping  on a beach somewhere, his skin yellow tinged, mouth thick with dreams of his next drink  
so real he can almost taste it. 

DORIAN KOTSIOPOULOS

Dorian Kotsiopoulos’s work has appeared in various journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander, Slipstream, New England Journal of Medicine, On the Seawall, The Ekphrastic Review, and Smartish Pace. She is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.