Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome Chicago poet and writer Gregorio Gómez Aguayo back into our pages with “The Room Where Time Tilts,” a poem poised on the surreal threshold between quiet, solitary evening and the dreamworld that shadows it. At home with his cats, Zuchitl and Fandango, the poet feels reality tilt and loosen, just slightly, stretching to hold something ineffable.
Zuchitl sits before her bowl, “staring into some secret only animals/ understand,” while Fandango drifts “through rooms the way a thought wanders through the skull.” Gregorio himself lingers sleepily over a half‑eaten ham‑and‑cheese sandwich, the muted TV flickering in the background. In this softened state, he slips into a dream of youth where memory and possibility blur. It feels astonishingly real.
“Some nights, the past feels more solid/ than the floor beneath my feet./ Some nights, the room spins just/ enough to remind me that time isn’t a/ straight line—/ it’s a loop, a whisper, a doorway half open.”
Gregorio creates a liminal world, one that feels familiar and inviting, one which indicates that the possibilities of youth exist undimmed on a different plane of consciousness. Gentle drifts of repetition and soft textual rhythm and alliteration shepherd us into a state of stillness, warmed by the candles of memory and the presence of two companion cats. There is, too, an intimation of immortality, reminding us that the finite is only one layer of experience. Gregorio challenges us to imagine beyond that boundary, to expect something more.
Read “The Room Where Time Tilts” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Gregorio Gómez Aguayo, a writer, director, producer, and organizer, has been at the heart of Chicago’s arts and spoken word communities for decades. An emigrant from Veracruz, Mexico, Gregorio was Managing Director of the Latino Chicago Theater Company which introduced many young Latino playwrights. For over 30 years, he was well known as the host of the infamous Weeds Live Poetry open mic and influenced many of the city’s most popular venues.
He was nominated for the prestigious award of Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois (2020), selected for Chicago’s Newcity’s Lit 50 (2022), and also nominated for poet Laureate of Chicago (2023).
He produced “Bohemios de Poesia Urbanos” at Agujón Theater (4/15/23), and published/produced “With a Photograph” a libretto of poetry and CD (2022). He has also produced two feature films and a documentary. His new book titled REQUIEM: Journey thru a Poetic Odyssey was released in March 2026.