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will be pricked by a very large and very unsuspecting needle. I was nineteen when I came to the United States for school. When the taxi driver asked me where I wanted to go, I told him I needed a sewing machine. He drove me to Joann’s. With traveler’s checks I bought my first sewing
machine: a Singer 10 stitch. It was clean and a very bright white. Later, when I got to the dorm for international students, I unpacked it onto a tiny folding card table in the corner of the room. My roommate, who was also Indian, had brought jars of various types of oil from Mumbai: jasmine, coconut, almond, and had set up along the other card table. She lis-
Black Walnut By Cleveland Wall You do know their roots poison everything in their paths, don’t you? — Melinda Rizzo
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Of all the magnificent trees under whose root ball I might lie, of all places to lose my last bits of self, poison or no, black walnut is for me, for I love her frondy leaves, her circumspect bark, neither too fine nor too rough, and good for colic. I love her high, straight bole, how the eventual branching off is perfect cantilever for a swing. I love the citrus tang of her green pods, their heft in hand, thud on the ground. I love the muscular squirrels leaping limb to limb and the squirrels’ wile and their fierce chittering for sovereignty. I love the obdurate shells and their brain-shaped meat. I love dappled shade in summer, lacy silhouettes in winter. I love how they show where the water is, by refusing to be anywhere else. I love the satin grain of the wood, its raveling flow revealed at last, and even the toxicity, the loneliness, I love. Oh, yes, black walnut—when I have grown past old, let me weave myself in your silken stem bite with your acerbic green stain the fingers of late scavengers with juglone ink drink deep through your taproot clearest water under bedrock, under tonnage of earth and flimsy bone cage. I will be a kingdom of squirrels, light-eater, shape-shifter, murderous as life. Cleveland is a poet and mail artist from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is a contributing editor for Poetry Writers in the Schools and hosts the poetry series for the New Bridge Group artists’ collective. Her work has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Möbius Magazine, and online in New Purlieu Review.
tened to me loudly sew shapes: sequined circles, zig-zaggy squares, polka-dotted rectangles while she layered her hair with oil. “What are you going to do with those shapes?” she asked. “Practicing,” I said. “What are you doing with that oil?” “My mom has thick hair,” she said. My mother called every week. She asked more questions about my machine than me. She demanded I call her right away when I had picked out a pattern, decided what I was going to make, and figured out when I would complete it.
In between classes I drove around the city looking for places that reminded me of home. The deadened shrub in front of the local library looked like the tuft of my father’s hair that my mother kept in a button box after he died. The convenience store window with the illegible scrawl reminded me of how quickly my mother could sew. The hospital with the steady stream of traffic felt like our house before a wedding: the half-naked women crowded in our tiny living room, comparing cup sizes and waiting to be measured. One day I saw an Indian family go into the hospital. They were unsure of what they were doing there, so I parked and followed them inside. They made it to the ER waiting room, speaking to each other in a language I didn’t know, but I listened carefully anyway. After the daughter’s name was called, everyone left, but I stayed. Several hours later an older white woman came by and asked if I was there to help. I told her yes; she gave me a schedule, and I started volunteering. My job was to help discharged patients leave the hospital. I started with minor cases: anxiety attacks, falls with no broken bones, overnight monitoring. After a month they moved me to the major cases: stents, radiation, physical rehabilitation. I didn’t cry at first. But after I escorted Rosie, a giggling patient
