Abstract
Barefoot Tango is a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose poem that follows a young girl’s visceral experience of childbirth. As her body fractures under the weight of labor, her perceptions splinter into a hallucinatory web of scent, sound, and memory. The text weaves grotesque and uncanny imagery with emotionally heightened first-person narration, revealing not only her physical trauma but the unresolved psychological tension surrounding a male figure who remains absent throughout the story. Her yandere-like tendencies and intense separation anxiety complicate the emotional landscape, casting birth as both a psychic crisis and a suspended moment of annihilation and rebirth. Without ever naming it, the piece renders birth trauma simultaneously unspeakable and omnipresent—felt in every rhythm, color, and sensory fold of the language.
Recommended Citation
XIĀO, Wendi
(2026)
"Barefoot Tango,"
Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine: Vol. 11:
Iss.
1, Article 17.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol11/iss1/17