Tana Jean Welch
Bathtub Full of Gin
In upper Norway, the natives drink bathtub gin
during their dark prohibition winters of seam-
less ice. I, too, use the bathtub as sanctuary—
soaking in moonshine while I muse over my cracked
therapist who insists on lifting my skirt
until I scream that her couch is a battlefield,
a sexually bent, microfiber battlefield
where each session ends with limes dropped in gin
and tonic. But her clothes stay, always, so we can skirt
the issue of love and candle wax, or what seems
like love but may only be paprika on egg, cracked
and scrambled into the illusion of sanctuary,
similar to the illusion of wild in an animal sanctuary,
or the illusion that the victor on a battlefield
has conquered his foe, or won anything more than a cracked
spirit. Even so, I’d like to win this one—it’d help the gin
go down smoother if the lizard-skin thread in the seam
of her boots opened in fissures and her tight-lipped skirt
lifted in time to the rising of my own skirt—
but Ah! My therapist insists on control. Her sanctuary
exists in the drenching of thighs in pure control: “Life seems
shitty,” she scolds, “because it is. My battlefield
is full of pocked bones. Toes and nipples caught in the gin,
cut off clean. Wedding china always ends up cracked,
your mother, the sidewalk, this tooth—all cracked.”
For her, the scandal of dropped glass is why a moat skirts
around the castle: “Fill the moat with Sapphire gin,
fill it with whatever it takes to keep the sanctuary,
to keep the precious-inside from the battlefield,
to keep what is separate from what only seems.”
My therapist will never know that the Self only seems
the jewel to protect. It’s the Other who must never be cracked.
When she gets like this, I breathe away from the battlefield,
imagine mangos as flesh, a secret papaya under her skirt.
You may be wondering why I pay for this sanctuary-
building advice when I have my bathtub to sweat out the gin.
But trust is not a short skirt; it’s a bowl of fruit and a battlefield.
Love is sweet juniper berries of gin shooting from a cracked
cannon; it’s the sanctuary of two bodies, the pain of welded seams.
