Acupuncture Point SI 19 by Vinita Agrawal
“Acupuncture Point SI” was an honorable mention for the 2026 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry. To read the judges’ comments on this poem, click here.
Acupuncture Point SI 19
The Listening Palace
Before the ear, a gate of bone
they call the Palace,
a point to needle
when the world goes dim and hums.
But the true palace is deeper, a coiled fire,
the visceral censor that takes the day's slurry—
all the noise, the clatter of a voice, the unsorted facts—
and in its wet, red dark, begins its work.
It is not the ear, but what hears through the ear.
It is the sieve for the heart, the separator of the pure
from the dross of a look, the lie in a sentence.
It is how we know what to keep and what to shed.
When it is strong, the heart can rest.
It doesn't have to sift the static.
The truth arrives, a clean note,
a single raindrop in the well.
When it is weak, the world is a cacophony.
A committee in the chest, all shouting.
The heart, bewildered, cannot choose its path.
It mistakes the echo for the voice.
So we build this palace from the inside,
not with marble, but with quiet.
We feed it not on food, but on the will
to separate the signal from the roaring static.
Until the final judgment it makes is clear:
this, I take in. This, I make my own.
And this, I let fall away, a husk,
a thing the fire never needed.
Note: The term "Listening Palace" is a name for the acupuncture point SI 19 Tinggong not the entire small intestine which is sometimes called the "Listening Palace" in the context of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Vinita Agrawal has authored seven books of poetry and edited two anthologies on climate change. Her latest poetry collection is The Hour of God published by Red River Press. Her poem “A Place Both Inside and Out” was shortlisted for poem of the year 2026 by Arc Poetry. She received the Fresh Voices Award from Mulberry Literary in May 2026 for her poem “Bird of Debt.” She was the runner-up for the 2025 Mānoa Journal poetry prize, runner-up for the Earth Amulet Poetry Prize (River Paw Press), and was awarded the 2024 Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature and the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize. She convened the PEN All-India Centre at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai, and she is on the advisory board of the Tagore Literary Prize.