Sawgrass Sky & Cocktails from a Personal Landscape
Poetry Collection:
Sawgrass Sky
Sawgrass Sky is a collection of poems written by Andrew Hemmert and published by Texas A&M University Press. These poems are an invitation to a personal landscape of memories, specific places of intense emotions ornamented with monuments of guilt and shame, punctuated by landmarks of awakening by which you can navigate the terrain which is hungry and overgrown and thick with longing.
Some birds collect bright threads
and weave them into the dry grass of their nests, so anyone
plucking a loose thread from their shirt could be, without knowing,
donating the weight on their shoulders to the intricate knot
in which two birds perpetuate the idea of flight.- “Sawgrass Sky”, Sawgrass Sky (p.56)
The first poem in the collection, “Wildfire”, is the gatekeeper to this landscape. Here, the speaker describes a suburb of tract houses and flattop lawns that “rolls out / its roads and sidewalks, its cul-de-sacs / like tent posts staking the world down” (1). Here, we’re welcomed into a familiar and safe space before the speaker declares that they’ve had enough silence, how they “wish quiet could always die this way, / one great howl rising up like heat and light” as the speaker gives power to their own voice to say what they’ve not said allowed before (1). It’s from this point forward that everything is upturned, the damp, raw emotions of guilt and shame and confusion pink and wriggling like what’s beneath an overturned rock in a swamp, wanting—and needing—to be seen, to be remembered. In “Birdhouse” and “Coyotes” the poems declare they’re existence, each a memory demanding to be acknowledged. “I’m here, / I’m here” the birds sing in “Birdhouse” when, in fact, they’re not what the speaker and his brother find inside the birdhouse, and in “Coyotes” the animals follow the speaker from home to home and even out of state as they grow, the coyotes like a memory the speaker can’t shake and whose tracks are like braille that reads “here I was, here” (9, 19).
I remember the idea of God
was sturdy in my life
as landscape itself
or as landscape seems to be
in memory, or a photo album.- “Father, Son, Ghost”, Sawgrass Sky (p.4)
Memory is the most prominent theme in this collection, particularly the close studying of memory that, in turn, reveals deeper themes with which the speaker wrestles. Conflicts between their God-fearing parents and their own secularism, complicated and strained family relationships, the speaker’s body and self-image, and the guilt and shame that rises out of those themes like unchecked kudzu, or the hungry landscape that threatens at every turn to swallow whole what remains.
This hunger is both feared and praised by the speaker of these poems. The fear is that they might forget these moments, these places and people, and that they’ll never be able to make up for letting down their family, or themselves, that they’ll never be absolved of the guilt they feel for what has happened. But these swallowed memories could be a release, reclaimed through no fault of the speaker’s own, those memories and events that are consumed and reclaimed unburden the speaker, no longer marring their personal landscape because beneath the loss of the Florida Panther and the three-legged dears and smokestacks and boxcars there is hope. Hope that, were the speaker to rewild their emotional landscape and let go their guilt, a release would come to them, a kind of peace that might describe itself as wild, beautiful, and necessary beyond familial and religious fidelity. Until then, this collection stands as an exploration of that internal world in which the speaker navigates their memory through industry and ruins, misplaced and misshapen wildlife, and through lyrical narratives that pull you close to admit something you’d never have guessed if you had stayed on the sidewalk in the safe streetlight glow of your own suburb.
Cocktails from a Personal Landscape
Cocktail: Sawgrass Sky
Florida I’ve made you into a graveyard again
and it’s not fair. You’re a sawgrass sky, you’re swarms of monarchs
like ripe orange groves in migration. You’re more than the violence
we heap on your head like phosphogypsum stacks, more than mugshots
and rubberneckers and the bitter mist that crop dusters drag
behind them like intangible advertisements. You’re more
than one man’s regrets. You’re more than the house I grew up in,
which isn’t mine anymore.- “Sawgrass Sky”, Sawgrass Sky (p.55-6)
Sawgrass Sky is Singapore Sling of the Floridian sort. Orange juice and passion fruit gather with citrus and tequila and yellow chartreuse for a sweet, tart, herbaceous drink. At the top, a cascade of complex, and complicated, flavor trickles dark towards the cocktail’s base until what remains is different and all that was is the memory of a taste you can barely remember the profile of without making another drink.
Sawgrass Sky
2oz Reposado Tequila (or light rum)
0.5oz Yellow Chartreuse
2oz Orange Juice
0.5oz Lime Juice
0.5oz Lemon Juice
0.75oz Passion Fruit Syrup
2 dashes Angostura Bitters
0.25oz Blue Curacao
0.25oz Cherry Heering
2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
Pack a tall glass crushed or pellet ice — make sure to put a straw in first!
Add the first seven ingredients to a shaker tin, add ice, and shake for 7-10 seconds; pour over the crushed ice; top with more crushed ice so the cocktail is domed.
Mix together the Blue Curacao, Cherry Heering, and Peychaud’s Bitters; pour over the top of the cocktail.
Garnish with mint sprigs threaded through a lime wheel.
*Passion Fruit Syrup: Mix equal parts rich simple syrup (2:1) with unsweetened passion fruit juice. Should keep in the refrigerator for at least a month.
Cocktail:
Breathless Machine of Plastic and Poise
. . .the thin straps stark
on my pale, skinny shoulders
and I am not like those mannequins,
no breathless machine of plastic and poise,
and I am not like my mother,
no woman, not the body meant
for these dark threads, I am a boy
standing in a dress standing
in his mother’s closet
wondering why it doesn’t feel strange . . .- “Vessel”, Sawgrass Sky (p. 12)
The Breathless Machine of Plastic and Poise is a Jack Rose wearing a Cosmopolitan dress. Rum replaces the apple jack, and pomegranate joins cranberry joins curacao and benedictine for a surprisingly bright, lightly-spiced cocktail that’s best served in a vessel, unused and reserved for special occasions, taken down from that shelf and shown off at last.
Breathless Machine of Plastic and Poise
1oz Navy Strength Rum
1oz Aged Jamaican Rum
0.25oz Dry Curacao
1tsp Benedictine
0.75oz Spiced Pomegranate Syrup*
0.5oz Cranberry Syrup
0.5oz Lemon Juice
0.5oz Lime Juice
Add all ingredients to a tin and then add ice; shake for 10-15 seconds.
Pour into a vessel fitting for a strong, beautiful cocktail — something gold-rimmed and stemmed is always a good choice.
*Spiced Pomegranate Syrup: Make a cinnamon syrup by adding 6oz of water to 8oz of white sugar with two broken cinnamon sticks (10g); heat to dissolve the sugar but don’t boil; allow to simmer for 10 minutes before removing from the heat and allowing to cool before straining out the cinnamon.
Mix 4oz of Cinnamon Syrup with 1oz of Pomegranate Molasses and 1oz of Pomegranate Juice. Refrigerate. Should stay viable for at least 12 weeks because of the sugar content.
Cocktail: Death in a Boiler Room
At the end of the Korean War,
my grandfather’s cruiser was torpedoed
and went down. And before the ocean
dragged everything under, he saw four of his friends
burn to death in a boiler room.
As long as I knew him, he never talked about it.
He never talked about the smoke
or the screams, where he’d been,
what he’d seen, between the boat’s disappearance . . . .
. . . .Mostly he was himself — he worked on phone lines,
funneling voices from place to place. He singed
the roof of his mouth on take-out pizza
and drank boilermakers in the kitchen, dropped
the shot glass straight into the mug
so the Old Milwuakee foamed hard,
like troubled water as he drank it all down.- “Elegy with Salt at the Root”, Sawgrass Sky (p.35-6)
Death in a Boiler Room is a boilermaker with some extra steps. The beer can be what you need it to be, but it should be unassuming, malty, and ice-cold. The shot is a riff on a Godfather, which is usually made with scotch. This improved sipper, or sinker, is made with Old Granddad Bonded Bourbon, amaretto, bitters, and scant amount of smokey, Islay scotch — Lagavulin 16. Boilermakers, and especially Death in a Boiler Room, are meant to be enjoyed however the hell you choose.
Death in a Boiler Room
12oz Can Old Milwaukee
1oz Old Granddad Bonded Bourbon
0.5oz Amaretto
0.25oz Lagavulin 16
1 dash Angostura Bitters
In a shot glass, or small rocks glass, add everything except for the Old Milwaukee. Pick a Luxardo cherry and use it to stir the drink before sinking it to the bottom.
Crack the Old Milwaukee. You can pour it into a glass and drop the cocktail into it and drink it, or you can sip the beer and cocktail one after the other. There’s no right way to enjoy Death in a Boiler Room.