Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back poet Peter Cashorali, who splits his time between Portland and Los Angeles. Peter closes the “Dreams” issue with “Blue Dream,” a surreal and evocative vision of blue birds gathering. Dream images are seldom what they seem to be, often stand-ins for something else, cryptic to the conscious mind. This poem is a metaphysical study of a particular blue.
“Blue that wasn’t just a color,/ Attribute of something else,/ But blue a substance of its own,/ Almost person, watchful self…”
This blueness which comes in with the birds is complex. More than melancholy, it is a strange guest to be welcomed, honored, and befriended. It has something to show us, something that is good.
“Flock of birds now filled the room,/ Having maybe chosen me/ Because I daily practiced grief/ Though who could say blue saw itself/ In terms of blues or any mood…”
The soothing rhythmic verse is mesmerizing. There is nothing to be solved or categorized here; there is only an invitation to belong and find peace at the edge of the infinite.
“Blue Dream” evokes nightfall, circling back to the first piece in the issue, Sara Risley’s poem “Little Yellow Birds,” in which a flock of yellow birds brings joy and opens up a new day. You’ll find birds shepherding us across the issue, joined by fish, cats and coyotes, sunlight and moonlight, and many other visitors.
Read “Blue Dream” in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist, formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Synkroniciti, Soul Forte Journal, Abandoned Mine, Brief Wilderness and Midwest Zen. Older work includes Gay Fairy Tales (Harper San Francisco: 1995) and Gay Fairy and Folk Tales (Faber and Faber: 1997).