Dry Needling – Emma Bolden
I told the doctor I couldn’t feel it was Alabama & August &
everything came up kudzu clucking the
orange off a far & feathered sky the
doctor requested further information
the doctor wondered if instead of not feeling I
meant I felt wrongly, was I pegging my hopes into a girl’s
hole, into a circle
that did not belong to me the doctor wondered if
I was wrong I had no right
I could not come to the terms made by men
who tried to make me I found no
inter-
rest between body & bedsheet under
the cut & thrust I could not whet, I was not
blade nor blossom the doctor desired more details
bade me say it plain & so I said by no faith or felon have I fallen
have I found the place within my body wishing well enough
to be
the point of entry the point was the entry
of another body the doctor said
& I blanked because I couldn’t
find
the point was it was August & everything
came
the feathered orange off the sky the doctor asked of
me only
my body laid down on the tabled
white
paper on which he mapped a plan to make me from my
pain into
a place that was at least willing to take, the doctor
asked of me
until he was not question but answer, until the orange
struck
through the side of his voice, I felt steeled my body against the
steel of
him & his hand against the side of my legs as he told
me to
open, he told me to spread, the paper had drawn me into
a place
where refusal was disobedience where I doubted, I knew I would be a bad
patient if I
said no & so I opened to the needles stuck into my private pink, neon with pain I
stayed
tabled as a sky under every man I had every man said there was
something
wrong with me & my body so my bad body & I had asked the doctor for
help
to be feathered to flight under the orange of a man & his lamps to say
yes to say
yes to say I want this I want to be righted, unwronged I want to be
cured &
so I & my body lay tabled white, I felt the pink in me,
I felt
its brightest places peeled an orange feathered
into violet
under the violence of his hands I told myself to
believe in
the Lord of scalpel, injection, every antiseptic odor, this was
the place it was August I had come with my body
because it was an it heavy under
my own uselessness, I could never heel to a hand that brought me to
a sun-
burst, I told myself to believe in the beauty of blankness between
the word
I & the right verb would follow I was falling under, I was a
falling out
against every crossed-out bulb & orange clucked off the lights, the doctor had his
needles
the doctor said beneath my most private pink my nerves knotted themselves into
triggers &
if I could take it I could fake it if he dry-needled each knot enough
it’d un-
spool inside the want I needed to be normal, the doctor proposed a
theory
of the body only as a means without end, the doctor
meant
when he talked about me a tunnel a door, a hall & way in
the back
of my throat I felt not warm but warming up the scales of a fish slit from its
skin, I
kept in my mind the image of a line peeling
itself away
from water & into the steep into curve of a cold
wave of
sweat or whatever washed over me, I was over it, I was
heading
to heel before he made me break orange, I saw in his hand his
needles silver
the doctors had his sharps & I was a note never quite hit right, he
asked me
did it hurt did it hurt did it hurt from top- scalp to toe bare & then I
wasn’t
feeling or a storm was coming, I wasn’t the electricity of green
threading
clouds up into a threat where had he touched me had he touched
me with
his needles into my pinks he had stuck his needles his needles he sharped into
me over
& over into the zero into which I could fall, I saw my own body as
landscape &
this was exactly the problem, he said I needed to focus on pleasure
in order
to feel pleasure but all I could feel was his silversharp his silversharp falling
out of
order & genus into a species where pain thrived in a kingdom no man nor
nailed
finger could enter, why had I come here, why was my
worth for every him I saw only in the tide pulling the wet of
my body towards him
you will have to learn to love the pain the doctor said with his
needles
you will have to let the pain become the lesson you learn
for him for his need remember you will never be enough,
for the purpose of woman is cleave to your man even if
his entrance should cleave you in two like his silversharp this oranged electric
pain my initiation into a religion where the only principle of faith was
that this fault the frigid lack that unworthed me
was all my body was all my own