Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome poet Eva Andrea Bertoglio of Portland, Oregon with three fascinating surrealist poems. “SNAIL DREAM” captures a fleeting waking dream as our narrator nears her freeway exit on a foggy, disorienting day. The mind is a strange creature–we have little control over where it wanders. The magic of Eva’s poem, like most dreams, is that we aren’t entirely sure what is real. “SNAIL DREAM” begins and ends in the car, but in between we cross time and space. From a scene on stairs with ancient snails she moves to her childhood bedroom, “and then I can see: the body that I left/ opens the window to the waifish moon,/ the voracious stars, and I step down/ the ladder to climb out—” The ethereal and eerie atmosphere Eva creates is intriguing and unsettling, reveling in the primal nature of the subconscious and the power of the feminine.
“WHAT IT MEANS TO DREAM OF A BED OUTSIDE ON A CLIFF” is a meticulous and marvelous reverso poem. The text here not only reads top to bottom or bottom to top, but also across. It is quite difficult to design a piece that provides an equally strong read in any direction, but Eva carries it off with drama, the form serving to heighten the surrealism of this bewitching and enigmatic text. It’s also a visual poem, to my eye resembling wings, although you may find something different.
Finally, “2. METACHROSIS” connects the personal and the universal using synchronicity, the perception of connection between unrelated phenomena. Metachrosis is the ability of some beings, for example the octopus, to alter their color at will. Eva uses color and texture to bind short episodes together, moving from green into deeper shades of chartreuse and peridot, from calcium white to sand to icy tundra. The last image before Eva ties off the poem is haunting: “capsules in a blue bowl spared my father/ and maybe condemned yours…” Modern medicine is a gamble–we don’t know how it interacts with the aging process or if we are helping or causing more pain. We are part of a progression, a mutability than transforms us into something we cannot yet see.
Read Eva’s rich and imaginative poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Eva Andrea Bertoglio is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working in Portland, Oregon. Her work is centered around surrealism, folklore, found language, and divinatory techniques. Previous publications include E-Ratio, Unchaste: Vol III, Pom Pom Lit, and Sulphur Surrealist Jungle.