Consider a *reference* to a variable:

$magic=4; #same as 2*2 last time I checked ;-)
%items=(1 => \$magic);
print "1: ${$items{1}}\n";
$magic+=1;
print "1: ${$items{1}}\n";
[download]

See perlref

--
perl -p -e "s/(?:\w);([st])/'\$1/mg"