Acupuncture Dream
A woman in denim
arranges the needles
in comforting symmetry metal pins
that salute
the window and its beads of rain
from their posts along my wrists.
Without machines the mind is free:
an expansion of sky and bird,
the Buddha in me quiet among the mud and lotus,
mind landed on the Chinese word
Kai her name sounds wide as oceans, ready to be used.
I mouth it in my sleep, cradle it in my brain
the way you do a piece of news before passing
it along. For a moment I forget the pins
and the room and the losses.
I levitate in the bliss of someday
when my daughter will be upside down
a mollusk on a blackened screen
and later when she will bend
to catch the rain puddled in skies
around her boots.
When I leave the room,
my eyelids have migrated
to my neck, each breath
so deep it is released
directly from a portal in my palm.
Poet’s Statement
Certain poems seem to write themselves and, occasionally, the end of a poem is not a close at all, as it opens a door to memory, dreamscape, and healing. “Acupuncture Dream” is just this poem for me: the first in a sequence about the transformative years when I navigated the grief and magic of waiting for a child. This poem embodies the seismic shift from focusing on the body’s failures and losses to its strength and possibility. Writing this poem was an act of letting go, much like the speaker’s breath released from a “portal” in her palm in the final lines of the work.
Editor’s Statement, by Jonah Meyer, Poetry Editor
Casey’s poem employs such gorgeous imagery—the “symmetry” of acupuncture pins as they “salute” windowed raindrops, the speaker “levitat[ing] in the bliss of someday.” Reading this piece proves an enjoyable experience—sounding out the Chinese name Kai and breathing so deeply, along with the poem’s speaker—an “expansion” of sorts radiating from within, much like the poem’s “sky and bird,” wide as ocean, silent as Buddha.
