Audrey Poetker

Audrey Poetker uses common human experiences and emotion to relate her own personal experiences to those of her readers.  Common themes in her poetry include pain, loss, grief, and relationships: elements of life which every human being experiences at some point.  In “Signs of Fertility”, Poetker addresses the universal motherly desire for children and contrasts it with the harsh reality of her own infertility.  The boundary between what one would normally know about her is bridged in this poem as she shares very personal feelings and struggles.    She also addresses the personal border between desire and reality.  This border is one which she cannot change, and “Signs of Fertility” shows how she comes to term with this. The poem is filled with vivid imagery and emotional accounts of aspects of her life. She then uses these to describe to her inability to have children.  An example of this is how, in lines 14 to 18, she relates her mother’s unused china to her unused breasts.  She also begins the poem by referencing “The Robe of Christ at the Cathedral in Trier” (lines 5-6), using religion to relate with her readers.

Fears of Parasites

1.

11:02 PM, daily, an alarm goes off, reminding me

to punch through thin silver foil,

release a small miracle full of hormones,

and place it in my tongue, wash it down with water.

Dark blue one week

Light blue the next

Green,

And finally white.

Some days, I awake vomiting,

My small form unable to take it when I forget a miracle,

and swallow two the next day.

2.

Exactly forty six hours into white

my paranoia begins, grows exponentially.

I wait and wait for hands to grip my insides and turn them inside out.

Wait for myself to burst into tears over irrational insecurities.

For red to stain my sheets at night,

drip onto white porcelain tiles of the shower in the morning.

Such a thing that I hated for so many years

Now causes jubilation.

3.

Vivid dreams of infants pouring forth from my gut,

Filling the Earth: Inevitable overpopulation,

Haunt my dreams at night.

Dreams of my life fade.

I no longer ride on a rickety train through India,

Or stare into nothingness and see everything.

I don’t explore the vast and beautiful outdoors of the world.

Don’t dance to music until my legs collapse.

My lungs no longer fill with smoke.

4.

They are replaced with visions of

a cage, built in the shape of a crib.

Where I am trapped alone and

Infant screams fill my ears.

Or the alternative,

In which I lay in a bright and hostile room

and cry out in unimaginable agony,

Hating myself for destroying a part of my lover and I,

Beautiful parasite of mine: sucked through a tube

for my own souls self preservation.

5.

As one dreams of the removal of a fatal tumor,

I dream of myself dry and barren, for many years to come

As a starving man hopes for food,

I hope for blood,

Saving me from a life I do not want.

This poem is very obviously different from Audrey Poetker’s “Symbols of Fertility”.  Her infertility causes a boundary between her reality and the desire for children and motherly instincts.  I also feel this boundary from those instincts because of my complete lack of desire for children at this point in my life.  I attempted to imitate her use of cycles in the final stanzas by using the cycle of taking birth control throughout the poem.  I also tried to use common human experiences to cross an instinctive boundary that lies between human beings.  I tried to do this through referencing the female menstrual cycle, the common use of birth control, and the idea that ones life is limited when they have children.

Bibliography:

"Mennonite Poetry: Audrey Poetker". goshen.edu. np. 2010. Web. March 30, 2013

\  Poetker, Audrey. "Symbols of Fertility"  A Cappella. Ann Hostetler.  Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 136-137. Print.

     

      (I apologize that the size is large on the last link.  The formatting for the blog keeps me from changing it.)