Few people are likely to come in contact with it.
It is a tall shrub or small tree with 6-12 leaflets arranged in pairs, and an additional single leaflet at the end of the midrib. The small yellowish green flowers, borne in clusters, mature into whitish green fruits that hang in loose clusters 10-30 cm in length. The male and female flowers of poison sumac are on separate plants, as in poison ivy and western poison oak. Although nonpoisonous sumac species have leaves similar to those of poison sumac, the nonpoisonous species have red fruits that form distinctive, erect, cone-shaped terminal heads, not the hanging whitish green fruits of poison sumac.