# bead workers

**Published by:** [lets test](https://paragraph.com/@lets-test/)
**Published on:** 2022-08-22
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@lets-test/bead-workers

## Content

Bead WorkersBY LAURA DA’ Needles in skilled hands pulled through cloth or skin move of their own gilded volition. Taaniwe laakwa? In Shawnee, you ask where in time as opposed to when and it helps me consider folds of territory tilled by memory and capacity where the ones I tender bloom quietly and eternally. A strain of heirloom corn roughly translates to the word sustainer—worlds that germinate inside such a word; wild horses, lilting shadows, glimpsed in the elbows of the hills like opaque flags of prayer. My distant kin in Neosho folded deep indigo beans into the palm of my hand and said try them where you stay. Within the words of a blessing in my husband’s language I recognize through repetition— The word for city. The word for garden. Like an heirloom seed, I was sown and cultivated back from the brink. To rise within a place in time, hands sorted hundreds of seeds; medicine and sustenance— pallid disks of immunosuppressants and steroids. Flint corn from the Scioto Valley. All those moments I shook too hard to do it myself. Running a finger across the slight backs of trade beads: cornflower blue, grassgreen, the white-heart red a fire-flood of sunset. I feel the shadow of my aunt’s beading wringing my neck and wrists. Spells to protect my casing gates. Cerrillos turquoise threaded into my earlobes. Intricate blueprints to the homelands kept my toes from the sky ladder’s sapphire rungs. Sustainers are all around: songs chanted seven states away—glistening exhalations of devotion and sacrifice, migrations of breath. Adorn the skin with glass. In a place in time the ground warms and opens— the hour is right, stitch a seed and it sustains.

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