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Polyhedron is an intimate manifesto on love, absence, and selfhood. From the violated spectacle of the Eiffel Tower to dishes at midnight, a fleeting hummingbird, and the cosmic elements of stars and dirt, it explores the space we occupy between earth and sky. The piece confronts the roles women are cast into — muse, maid, specimen — rejecting the projections and performances of men, a journey from silence and erasure toward limitlessness, refusing to be reduced to an image in someone else’s story.
I stare out my courtyard and watch the 6 different colored lights illuminate the silhouettes on each floor. The seventh, otherwise a dark void, reflects the glittered performance of the iron lady.
For 10 months I returned to silently study her. She hardly has a moment to speak for herself. Constantly used and violated for the fantasies of others. Night after night she was lit, her body split into beams, raped by neon, devoured by spectacle. Crowds screamed for performance but never sat with her stillness. She was never left alone, never allowed her intended purpose. Only when the motors stopped, when the lights went dark, when she rested in exhaustion, could her beauty be seen for what it was.
Paris. The city of love.
Not the city of romance.
Love takes one person. Romance takes two.
Paris never taught me romance. Only loneliness and misunderstanding.
And maybe that is love.
Absence swelling with its own answers,
silence carving out a chasm only I am invited to explore.
Demands calcify into unspoken obligations.
Dishes at midnight, water scalding my hands, blood boiling.
The bookshelf left bare, erasing a life that was never mine.
As if tidying up the remains was my final duty, the last act of a role I never agreed to play.
I now stare out at morning marine haze coating lush gardens.
I watch a hummingbird be chased by a squirrel.
Flight pursued by hunger.
The moment passes.
There is nothing that rests but a limitless stage for my psyche.
No matter where I run to there is always a cage waiting for me to mistake it as love.
He mistook possession for devotion.
Victimhood as emotional maturity.
Dismissiveness as self responsibility.
I mistook fantasy for depth.
It has always been a man's world.
But I will not live inside the movies men make for themselves.
I am often silent.
The moment I speak their reality shatters.
I listen as I watch them expose who they really are.
For I am made of stars and dirt.
The elements that once burned in the cores of collapsing suns,
hardened into rock, softened into soil, dissolved into rivers,
now pulse through my bloodstream, blush at my lips, ignite the heat of my skin.
I carry the fire of ancient stars; I rise from the dust of earth.
When starfire and soil meet, they are limitless.
I am terrified.
And I am limitless.
I would rather be placed into the abyss, mirrored into infinity,
than be reduced to an image for your story, caged in your camera,
my dignity stripped, my pain frozen and pinned like an animal
for your keeping.
Polyhedron is an intimate manifesto on love, absence, and selfhood. From the violated spectacle of the Eiffel Tower to dishes at midnight, a fleeting hummingbird, and the cosmic elements of stars and dirt, it explores the space we occupy between earth and sky. The piece confronts the roles women are cast into — muse, maid, specimen — rejecting the projections and performances of men, a journey from silence and erasure toward limitlessness, refusing to be reduced to an image in someone else’s story.
I stare out my courtyard and watch the 6 different colored lights illuminate the silhouettes on each floor. The seventh, otherwise a dark void, reflects the glittered performance of the iron lady.
For 10 months I returned to silently study her. She hardly has a moment to speak for herself. Constantly used and violated for the fantasies of others. Night after night she was lit, her body split into beams, raped by neon, devoured by spectacle. Crowds screamed for performance but never sat with her stillness. She was never left alone, never allowed her intended purpose. Only when the motors stopped, when the lights went dark, when she rested in exhaustion, could her beauty be seen for what it was.
Paris. The city of love.
Not the city of romance.
Love takes one person. Romance takes two.
Paris never taught me romance. Only loneliness and misunderstanding.
And maybe that is love.
Absence swelling with its own answers,
silence carving out a chasm only I am invited to explore.
Demands calcify into unspoken obligations.
Dishes at midnight, water scalding my hands, blood boiling.
The bookshelf left bare, erasing a life that was never mine.
As if tidying up the remains was my final duty, the last act of a role I never agreed to play.
I now stare out at morning marine haze coating lush gardens.
I watch a hummingbird be chased by a squirrel.
Flight pursued by hunger.
The moment passes.
There is nothing that rests but a limitless stage for my psyche.
No matter where I run to there is always a cage waiting for me to mistake it as love.
He mistook possession for devotion.
Victimhood as emotional maturity.
Dismissiveness as self responsibility.
I mistook fantasy for depth.
It has always been a man's world.
But I will not live inside the movies men make for themselves.
I am often silent.
The moment I speak their reality shatters.
I listen as I watch them expose who they really are.
For I am made of stars and dirt.
The elements that once burned in the cores of collapsing suns,
hardened into rock, softened into soil, dissolved into rivers,
now pulse through my bloodstream, blush at my lips, ignite the heat of my skin.
I carry the fire of ancient stars; I rise from the dust of earth.
When starfire and soil meet, they are limitless.
I am terrified.
And I am limitless.
I would rather be placed into the abyss, mirrored into infinity,
than be reduced to an image for your story, caged in your camera,
my dignity stripped, my pain frozen and pinned like an animal
for your keeping.
