Desire, Coffee, and Studies Abroad
“Easy Like Sunday Morning”
From RATTLE and taken by Shannon Jackson.
Poem: “Study Abroad”
“Study Abroad”, written by Cassie Burkhardt and published online at Rattle, is a bittersweet reminder of youth and why we look back through the windows of our memory. The poem is a scene of desire and young passion witnessed now from a distance, a vantage point removed from the coming-of-age moment that is honest and raw. An Ekphrastic poem responding to Shannon Jackson’s image of curtains billowing in an open, bedside window, Burkhardt gifts us with a poem as bold and powerfully packed with energy as the café au lait the poem’s speaker enjoys with her older lover, Francesco.
…we had been rolling around in the sheets, windows wide open
for hours and hours, in and out of half-sleep, and is it Sunday?
Hair a blonde rumple, pillows gasping for air,
underwear slingshot across the room.
This is love, I thought.
I was twenty.
— ”Study Abroad”
Cassie Burkhardt
Rattle online, December 30th, 2021
“It’s hard not to gulp what’s good”, the speaker tells us of the coffee, a metaphor that stitches the passionate beginning of this relationship to it’s end. “This lasted for exactly two months / until I could tell something had worn off”, she says at the poem’s turn after weeks of rolling in the sheets and “melting into each other’s bodies”, juxtaposing the unbridled desire that feels at once remarkable and familiar: a youthful and recognizable yielding to passion that happens less frequently with age, with that cost, of such emotional abandon, being at the very heart of the poem’s potency. “It was the first time sex was pleasure”, she tells us, “and I wasn’t about to hold back.”
The moment that pleasure and closeness give way to distance reveals the shape of the poem’s recognizable emotional conflict without naming it: an ethereal moment, formless, sharp and sudden, that turns the relationship from two bodies melting together into a woman who “panicked, cut class, showed up at his place in the afternoon unannounced, / knocking furiously at the door / … my high heels and halter-top-desperation / oozing all over the salle de séjour like octopus ink.”
I am a fool, I thought,
and excused myself to the bedroom,
stared out the big beautiful window at the foot of his bed,
watched the curtains take deep breaths.
Eventually, he came in and sat down quietly beside me
like how you might at church, a funeral.
He handed me a coffee. He didn’t have one.
— ”Study Abroad”
Cassie Burkhardt
Rattle online, December 30th, 2021
It’s truly an exceptional skill to contain within a single poem’s boundaries the lofty heights of a heart in love and its return to earth. With so little time, and so few words, Burkhardt reminds us of those feelings, of first, passionate loves that evanesce for no reason other than “something had worn off”, and presenting a poem that invites us into an intimate memory that reminds us of our own similar memories. It’s this universally shared feeling told with such unique and engrossing specificity that leads us to trace our memories from our own inner windows, and gives “Study Abroad” its unnamable, bitter-sweet coming of age glow.
Cocktail:
Desirous, Covetous Being
I am a woman, I thought,
a desirous, covetous being:
toes, breasts, hip bones, curve of spine on cotton …
I divided him in half with my tongue, a slow line from hip bones to lips
before I undressed him completely and then we switched.
He could taste the hunger in me, could tell I was one wick
and a handful of matches on the inside.
He fed the fire.
He fed it motorcycles, sex
and coffee.
— ”Study Abroad”
Cassie Burkhardt
Rattle online, December 30th, 2021
Café au lait (coffee with milk) is, traditionally, coffee with warm milk added. In Europe, the rules can change from country to country, with many having their own sizes and standards of coffee, from dark roast to light, from espresso to drip. In the United States, café au lait is usually drip coffee with steamed milk added. The original French tradition also sees the drink served in a bowl.
A Desirous, Covetous Being is an espresso martini that picks you up on a motorcycle when you go out. It wants you, and, after it has you, wants you again. Cognac replaces the traditional vodka, creating a bold, cherry-spiced core around which crème de cacao, cherry heering, and amari are wrapped. Rich espresso and cream sherry bring the drink together, giving it a sweet, luscious texture, the whole cocktail something you try to sip gingerly but it’s hard not to gulp what’s good.
Desirous, Covetous Being
1.5oz Cognac (Pierre Ferrand 1840 Cognac)
0.25oz Fernet Branca Amaro
0.25oz Pasubio Amaro
0.25oz Creme de Cacao
1oz Cream Sherry
0.5oz Espresso
0.25oz Heavy Cream
Add all of the ingredients together in a shaker, add ice, and shake hard for 10-15 seconds.
Double strain into a short coupe glass and garnish with a dusting of cocoa powder.