Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: What does it truly mean to see through something? Through someone? What does it truly mean to encounter the unexpected? Teague’s dynamic and swift-moving prose poem floods the reader’s mind with nervy, hot branches. Flow-y language and image merge, revealing the innards of something truly breath-taking.
Listen to Teague read the prose poem:
The Visible Woman
Here comes the heat, the tech says—radioactive juice through my veins from his sheltered booth. He used to be a raft guide, misses rivers as I miss my explicable ribs, my painless breath, my river of a body I’m still in—stepping always in the same-different currents of my skin. Here comes the kettling, the boil toward transparency—a deep purple verb in the wet cave of my throat, a flush of body bodying on-screen. A body seen. Clear. Nuclear. Like the Visible Woman in her plexiglass-clear skin once lied to me I wouldn’t grow to be. One button for her heart to light up red. One for the nervy, branching rivers in her head. Her body: compliant as leopards at Fort Worth’s famous zoo, summers I didn’t paddle rivers: the Trinity sludging downtown, raftless, dull as most pain, shit-brown. (Bodies rumored to be sunken in it.) One button for the past cement-blocked inside our bodies, the circuitry of nearly fifty years short-circuiting, quietly, too deep to see. Here comes the feeling that you’re peeing, but you’re not. Hot flush splashing my crotch. Fort Worth: The Unexpected City! a disembodied voice in DFW last week kept announcing. Touristic, euphemistic. As if no one expected a city there at all: city of my birth into this city of a body where clouds float the unexpected walls of me, where fish swim past inside the tech’s daydreams, where there’s nothing or everything to see. Here comes the freeze-frame, breath-hold, blood-spot where he unhooks the IV.
Alexandra Teague is the author of [ominous music intensifying] (Persea, 2024), three prior books of poetry, a novel, and the memoir Spinning Tea Cups (Oregon State University Press, 2023), as well as co-editor of Bullets into Bells. She is a professor of creative writing and chair of English at University of Idaho.
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