August 19, 2023 - Samantha De Tillio’s “Night Poem, New Cities”

NIGHT POEM, NEW CITIES

My boots tap a continuous rhythm on sidewalks littered with trash from yesterday, last week, two years ago; I thought I'd never leave but now I'm here. My feet twitch at the end of my bed in a choreography of muscle-memory, while my brain fires in all directions like the fireworks that used to be for the Fourth of July but these days sound an endless staccato like rain pattering on the hood of your car like the year we were stuck in a downpour and left before the fireworks started. Instead we pointed our headlights into the darkness toward new paths that leave me feeling hopeful yet terrified because I can’t handle the stillness or silence and the air conditioner's monotonous performance reminds me that it cuts out all the good sounds here. The vibrations of the cicadas make me feel at home. They are the excess electricity in the power lines suspended from polls marching down streets in a haphazard formation, an army that could never past muster yet mimics the anxious patterns in my brain. Both grateful to be gone and mourning the way your cast-aside bagel wrapper smudged with cream cheese still makes me hungry for more.

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Samantha De Tillio is a writer, curator, and craft scholar. Her art writing has been published in Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, where she is contributing editor, in exhibition catalogues, such as Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy, for which she is sole author, among others. Her poetry, which she has been writing since 2016, has yet to be published*, but she has read for Brooklyn Poets events and for Girlhood a Honey Dipped Girls performance series.

*until now!