Black Walnut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cleveland Wall

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 listened 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

Black Walnut

By Cleveland Wall

You do know their roots poison everything in their paths, don ’t you?

— Melinda Rizzo

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.

who ’d suffered a stroke, into a van, I hid in the storage closet and bawled. I couldn ’t get her face out of my head: one side hung as though someone held an invisible string and was pulling it askew, testing how far it would go. I thought about my sewing machine.

My eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw that I was not alone. A man was also crying, softly, his hands over his face. His nails were chewed down, his knuckles like gaping bandages.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“Why are you crying?”

I thought about my favorite stitch on the Singer, the one that looked like the arc of a bat flying home after a long night of hunting. “I can ’t fly away, ” I said.

He stopped and took his hands away from his face. He looked me straight on with bloodshot eyes. His chin was round, and I wanted to push on it, shape it into something else.

“What if people are better off dying?” he asked. His eyelashes dropped with wetness. I wanted to carry them in my skirt the way women carried mangoes in India, trying to sell them but not really trying to sell them because then there wouldn ’t be any left to eat.

We remained silent until someone called for me over the intercom. Another patient was going home.

On his way off shift he was sitting outside of the hospital smoking a cigarette, his shirt half-done so that I could see the curly black hair like mattress springs on his chest and the gold cross he wore around his neck.

“Hey, ” he called to me. “What’ s your name?”

“Rukmani. ”

“I’ m Bopal, a third year. You want to get some dinner?”

We went to a sushi bar, and by the time the rolls and sticks came, the back of my neck was soaked. He watched me stare at the food. He shoved the chopsticks aside and nudged a piece toward me.

“You have carpenter hands, ” he said, but I didn ’t understand. I picked up the roll with my fingers and swallowed. He laughed. Later in his shiny efficient car we kissed three times: one for chemistry, two for compatibility, and three for longevity.

“We will be together for a long time, ” he said after the third kiss. He was my first kiss, my first in bed, my first everything.

That night I got on the computer, and after hours of searching I purchased my very first pattern. It was an old style of silk robes, long flowing, drape-y things with sashes cinching in the waist and sleeves like wings. They reminded me of fish that were not of this world.

I called my mother and told her. I also told her about Bopal. She begged me to get a thimble.

Though conflicted, Bopal continued with medical school and decided upon pediatrics as his specialty because someday he wanted children with me. He decided when it was time for us to be serious, when it was time to move in together. He told me I wasn ’t capable of making those choices. “You are always changing your mind, Ruk. Stick to one point, ” Bopal said when we were in a fabric store, and I was cycling silk in and out of our cart, but it was easy to go between, to not fixate on one stance. He called me peripatetic, his vocabulary extensive and freeflowing, and sometimes morigerous, but he didn ’t mean it as an insult.

Bopal was blunt and forward and said I had gone too long without someone heady in my life. I thought it strange at first, but he liked to use my towel right after I showered, when it was wet and he said he could feel the places where my body had touched it. But later after I thought about it some I would wait for him to use my towel, and then I would use it again, feeling the places where his body had touched mine. On the nights he worked and didn ’t come home, I slept with his towel, holding it underneath my t-shirt so that it would not dry. It smelled like the ocean.

He praised my ability with numbers, so the next day I changed my major from cultural studies to accounting. Sex made him so happy that I’d get on the internet and watch porn to learn. And I didn ’t tell my mother but I converted to Christianity because of his gold cross. When I touched it, it felt like Bopal, warm and hard at the same time.

To balance his rough demeanor, he bore a sensitivity that was light, but also deep. He cried during sad movies. He visited his elderly parents and cleaned their bathroom. He watched his friends ’ kids when they needed a night out.

In my head I called Bopal narisimha: half-lion, half-man, an avatar of Vishnu. My mother kept a tapestry of narisimha in the bedroom we ’d shared; “the Great Protector, ” he kept us safe from the things that my mother and I never talked about.

One night coming home very late from a surgical rotation Bopal had been doing at the hospital, a bonus shift he had taken from another resident so that he could celebrate an anniversary, Bopal fell asleep. His car had veered into oncoming traffic and killed two children on their way home from their grandmother ’ s house. Bopal was alive on the way to the hospital, but he died of a heart attack before the paramedics could even lift his body out of the van.

After I notified his parents about what had happened, I threw out the Singer, which had been giving me bobbin wind-up problems anyway, and purchased a Brother 25 stitch, which came with different feet. Some of the stitches looked like sutures. I finished the silk robe I had started and slept in it with a wet towel next to my waist.

Some fabrics require a high tension setting; other fabrics do not and will pucker along the seams if the setting is not adjusted properly. Ensure that the thread can withstand the tension desired; too much tension may cause cheaplymade threads to break.

My mother called me every day. Sometimes I answered; sometimes I pretended that I did, and we would have real conversations that had nothing to do with sewing. She sent me scraps of fabric in the mail: squares of bubbly denim, seethrough chiffon, and rough polyester. When she sent me a plane ticket, I called and told her to stop. After that she airmailed a pattern that she had penciled. The parchment paper was dotted with charcoal marks. I could still picture her favorite pencil sitting behind her ear as though a watchful apprentice.

Her instructions indicated fleece. I purchased more than I needed, skipped class for two days to finish. It was a combination blanket and hood, but it didn ’t have any arm holes. At first I thought I had sewed it wrong, but the instructions were clear. When I tried it on, my arms were kept snug against my body, but I couldn ’t move them. My head was secure, my torso warm.

I stayed in this blanket for days until the one morning I woke up and did not turn away from the sun.

I finished school and took an accounting job at a large commercial bank. Every morning I got to work early and stood on the sidewalk and watched the flurry of people circle through the revolving glass doors, their bodies pressed against the transparent elevator that crept up the side of the building.

“I see you here every day, ” a man said. His cologne was loud. “What are you looking at?”

“Life, ” I said. When he didn ’t move from my side I turned to look at him. He was a large man, tall and hefty, with stunning blue eyes and an ethnicity I could not determine. My eyes moved back to the people coming down the elevator, and it looked like they were falling. I held my hands up in the air, and he laughed.

His name was Chris, and he ’d bring me bagels and muffins and donuts and we ’d eat breakfast while watching the working people go to their offices. On our first official date he took me to an Ethiopian restaurant. He tore the pieces of flat bread and dipped them in stew for me. We kissed afterward, in his house. I lost track of the number of kisses. I lost track of a lot of things when I was with him.

When I told my mother about Chris, she asked me what I was sewing. She seemed upset when I told her that I wasn ’t working on anything. She wanted to know the settings on my machine and chastised me because I had put the tension on five without ever starting at three. “You will break, ” she said. “You will break. ”

During a run for fast food, as my car ’ s engine sat idling, Chris put his head in my lap and proposed. No ring, but he ’d borrowed a crown at the window and placed it on my head. “My kingdom, my lady, ” he said.

Chris and I married within six months. The wedding was filled with people from his family: those from his father ’ s American side, and those from his mother ’ s European side.

My mother could not leave her business to come. It was wedding season for her too. “When will you come visit me?” she asked. “I want to hold you. ”

“Soon. ” I wanted to bring her a child to sew for.

At the reception Chris drank too much and whispered in my ear, “It’ s like you live to love me. ” He felt up my gown and pressed me against the head table. I thought I saw my mother in the corner of the hall, holding up my old sewing machine. I left the reception to call her again, but she did not answer.

A few days later I received a letter from my aunt that my mother had died sometime on my wedding day, around the time Chris was sticking his tongue in my mouth.

My mother passed from a diabetesrelated infection that had begun in her pedal foot. The doctors had cut away and found a large, brackish growth that smelled like a drowned rat. There was nothing they could do because she wouldn ’t let them. Contumacious, Bopal would have said had he still been here.

As some sort of consolation, the family sent me a box with all of her old patterns, many of them ones she had drawn up herself. I closed my eyes and reached in. I pulled out a mock-up for a little girl’ s party dress. It was new, articulated in her favorite charcoal pencil. I began sewing.

Pay attention to the needle thickness. Thicker fabrics like denim, fleece, and suede require thicker needles, but more delicate fabrics like silk, velvet, and chiffon require thinner needles else the stitching will damage the fabric.

“Let’ s have a baby, ” Chris announced one night five months after our wedding. “You ’ re not done with that thing yet?” He poked at the dress. I had gone back and forth on different choices for the material and had finally settled on a flattened black denim. The piping would be white. Every time I finished stitching two pieces together, I used the seam ripper and started over again. The edges were becoming ragged. It was taking too long.

“Rukmani?” My neck hurt from bending over the torn seams. He took the ripper from me and looked at it. “It looks like teeth. ”

I didn ’t ask for it back but held my palm up, hoping he would just drop it in.

“I think the pharmacy is still open; let’ s pick up some ovulation kits. ” I was not ovulating. Bopal used to schedule the cleaning of the bathroom by my period.

Through the onion-skin walls I could hear the car starting, the engine idling, Chris waiting. My palm was still up when I stood from the chair. I used the inside to soothe my face, which was wet and smelled like Bopal’ s ocean.

In the drug store, his arm around my waist, Chris whistled while he selected the kits. I watched him finger them as if they were legs. He paid the cashier who didn ’t have a big enough bag for all of