I firmly believe that there was a time, age gone by you call it, when I would have found myself traveling through the ragged rural towns of southern Minnesota in an old jalopy. In a cheap vest and pants that left off a little high on my shins, I would stroll gallantly into the most bustling county fairs; I love something about the scent of fresh corndogs. Popping open my trunk I would soapbox about my finer wares: some toys for children, a miraculous machine from the impending future, or a miracle nostrum of my own invention, resting impotent, green and sickly in an old tonic bottle. I would stay until I grew sick of the flashing lights and screaming children, the loud carnival sounds, and the cotton candy sugar in the air. Or they would chase me out, mistrusting something about my patchy beard or the way my eyes twinkled. Then I would drive home around dusk to pass my time in a dark bar under a neon sign: “The Commodore,” buzzing on and off and on, in sleepy St. Paul Minnesota.
Or you could just call it “The 20s”
This is exactly the realm of my mind that Paulina Schemanski inhabits.
Paulina carries this air, as if she was straight out of a pulpy fiction rag, the kind I read on my living room floor when I’m putting off the “real” literature. It goes beyond her stoic beauty or the way she effortlessly dresses in only black. Paulina’s rugged independence and simultaneous unbridled femininity allude to a time gone by, before make-up was enriched and caked onto apes in laboratories.
I can put it like this: When I’m drinking a beer with her in her kitchen, she can talk freely about how she swoons over the old male authors, as if they weren’t part of the patriarchal cannon. She loves weddings, but doesn’t think she will get married.
All these things shine through in Paulina’s writing and her authoritative grasp upon the English Language. Paulina works as the essay editor of the University of Wisconsin Madison’s undergraduate humanities journal: Illumination as well as working on the poetry staff of The Madison Review.
The last line of this poem, Rain and Water, comes from a story told to Paulina by her boyfriend. A friend of his had decided to jump over a large post, though in attempting it actually injured his testicles. The inconsequential anecdote ended with the sentence “and that was the same day he caught a bird in his hands.” As does the poem.
rain and water
his suitcase overflowed with solid colored t-shirts and
manuscript pages with quarter notes copied
from the broken keyboard
on her carpet floor.
on the threshold:
my knees are aching from standing by you
in this moment before rain.
i’m avoiding getting wet, my darling
and you should do the same.
that was the same day she witnessed
a truck driver eating an apple
and a boy who caught a bird in his hands.
his suitcase overflowed with solid colored t-shirts and
manuscript pages with quarter notes copied
from the broken keyboard
on her carpet floor.
on the threshold:
my knees are aching from standing by you
in this moment before rain.
i’m avoiding getting wet, my darling
and you should do the same.
that was the same day she witnessed
a truck driver eating an apple
and a boy who caught a bird in his hands.
Paulina is studying English at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Her friends call her Paul. I have it on good authority that she has just purchased a new ribbon for her typewriter.
photos by Logan Jaffe (http://loganjaffe.blogspot.com) care of the facebook.
Her friends call her Paul. I have it on good authority that she has just purchased a new ribbon for her typewriter.
photos by Logan Jaffe (http://loganjaffe.blogspot.com) care of the facebook.
