They say the water forgives, but they never asked it first,
it smells like bleach and quiet things, like God in reverse.
Saint Chlorine waits by the drain with her fingers cold and pale,
she lights a candle from your memory, then blesses you with fail.
They call it therapy, call it a soak,
but the faucet speaks in prayers that choke.
The mirror fogs with names I swore were gone,
and the saints beneath the surface start humming their song.
The bathtub saints don’t wear robes,
just gauze and rope and grace,
they smile through soap-scummed porcelain with kindness on their face.
They whisper absolution with a breath like rusted steel,
and every time I sink beneath, I forget how not to feel.
Saint Chlorine, come take me in,
scrub my skin of every sin.
The bathtub saints, they know me well–
they baptize pain where silence fell.
She dipped my wrists like rosaries and sighed when I resisted,
said, “The first time stings, the second sings,
by the third you’re barely twisted.”
She pushed me under not to kill, but to cleanse the final spark,
and whispered, “This is what we do for those afraid of dark.”
I saw a boy beneath the foam who looked a lot like me,
he smiled with cracked enamel teeth and bled into the sea.
His lips moved slow in mirror talk and said, “You’re not alone,”
then vanished when the bubbles broke and left me with her tone.
The water warms when I confess,
then cools when I pretend it’s less.
And when I breathe beneath the line,
she counts my sins in saline time.
They found me dry and wrapped in white,
said I slipped sometime in the night.
But I still feel her kiss behind my ear,
and the hum of saints that no one hears.