Fairy Bells

by AARON EL SABROUT

Followed the foxglove trail all the way up,
everything was dappled through my thoughts—
the moss the salal the alder leaves.

Everybody knows about Mississippi goddam
but don’t nobody know about this god dam—
the fish don’t swim upstream no more,

the fish don’t swim upstream.
Brambles caught my ankles, call me Achilles,
only dipped me in the river to the heels.

Always running, don’t know where I’m running
from. Guess I had to do it for the salmon,
they don’t run no more.

Ran through the woods screaming.
If the qur’an is just a rap verse,
does that make this al sirat al mustaqim?

Does that make me rab el alamein?
The first world a kind of cage—
a box with a popcorn ceiling,

can’t remember if I came here on purpose.
The water runs brown sometimes, just like
back home. We don’t drink it then.

I learn everything through blue windows
that don’t show the outside, just the inside
of another box. Berries come from boxes too

in this world, but I meet them on the other side
waving in the breeze or kissing my heels with briars;
stuff them into my mouth with pricked hands.

The land is always there wherever you go,
you just have to prepare a bundle, perform a ritual,
and suddenly there you will find yourself—

in the other world. The water runs clear and sweet
through the mountains, oarsmen paddling the stills—
above the dam, though near the empty creek bed

below the dam, some nights you can still hear
the great horned owls shriek, and the soft whuff
of their wings as they make a kill.