In her 1985 poem, This is the Noise of Myth, the late Irish poet Eavan Borland considers a tradition of women whose identities were long tethered to type (class type, gendered type, stereotype).

It reads as an almost biblical parable: man and woman, intimacy and fugitivity. Struggle. Landscape. Light.

Borland viewed fables as the enemy of feminism, a source of fiction and friction, both. Myth cast a long shadow, unyielding and restrictive, a recursive loop.

This is mine.
This sequence of evicted possibilities.
Displaced facts. Tricks of light. Reflections.
Invention. Legend. Myth. What you will.
The shifts and fluencies are infinite.

In this painting, a lace collar is a chokehold, wild hair swirling above it like smoke from a chimney. Is a collar an ornament? An instrument? (Is a woman an ornament or an instrument?) Does it depend on who's looking, on what you see, or do not see?

Or do not choose to see?

All perception is a subtle form of trickery. History is its own chokehold. We are all displaced facts.