"Siren Sestina" by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose

...her pastor drew water for her dunking. She’d been close-lipped. But her sisters turned her in. It’s how nymphs survive: we throw each other under the Word. She let the church lead her to water.

Photo by Alex Nicolopoulos / Unsplash

Get out of their language. Go back through all the names they gave you. I’m waiting for you.—Luce Irigaray, from When Our Lips Speak

Church said Jesus was the word and the word

was God made flesh, communion-sweet on lips.

Suckled by this doctrine, she grew up drawn

to language, its subtexts and slippage, meanings,

the whorls of syntax, how a name can be used

to harpoon girls. Take for example: “nymph,”

epithet derived from that psycho-slur “nymph-

omaniac” for women who like sex. Same word

Nabokov’s pedophile Humbert Humbert used

to pin Lolita to his bed. Medically speaking: lips

of the labia. In the insect world, meaning

unwinged stage of change. Its roots drawn

from fables of fishy femme fatales who draw

in and drown sailors. But even a virgin nymph

can be accused of sinking men. As if girls mean

to tease and turn balls blue, as if the word

no’s a ruse to bruise fragile egos, our very lips

a bait and switch jingle. She never did get used

to that sword’s double-edge. At first, she used

men for pleasure. Hers. Then her pastor drew

water for her dunking. She’d been close-lipped.

But her sisters turned her in. It’s how nymphs

survive: we throw each other under the Word.

She let the church lead her to water. Meaning

she faked her own drowning. “Born Again” meant

she got to start over. She sang for her supper, used

the loophole, slipped the net of man-made words

they tried to snag her in. Pretended she was drawn

to God, a grand return to the stage of larval nymph.

“So long, sin-slinging siren.” But she was just lip-

syncing their come-to-Jesus Karaoke: total eclipse

of woman by myth (worthless song). After awhile

she wearied of playing wet-eyed wincing nymph

tip-toeing the blood-red carpet. No longer amused

by their desire to believe, nor willing to be drawn

and quartered by shame, she spells a new afterword,

flips the drowning script, in her own nimble tongue

sings herself whole. And when they accuse her of

unmanning the ship, she abandons their sinking world.

Swims out.

Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose (she/her) is the author of two chapbooks: Wild Things, (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Imago, Dei (winner, Rattle Chapbook Poetry Prize, 2022). Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Sun, McSweeney’s, Lunch Ticket, Verse Daily, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Awarded the 2025 Betsy Colquitt Poetry Prize, Elizabeth teaches writing and gender studies in Rochester, NY where she also leads trauma-writing workshops at the Breast Cancer Coalition and serves on the board of Just Poets. Elizabeth reads for Trio House Press.