Two poems from Felino Soriano

Painters’ Exhalations 90

                        —after Ella Guru’s Congregation


Staring into a body felt
by the unseen eyes. The listening

discerning pebbles placed atop lake
tongues, swallowed, —this is a talent

multitude hiding often in wrinkled fabric
the mind cannot mend until

light threads altered connotations. They a smiling
foreground

to the jazz inheritance full-swing method
riding the trumpet solo

away into imagination’s various homes
forming bodies with fingers

snapping echoes available for lengthy

musical interpretation. Wine glasses sipped dead.

Absence here means nothing

as in a crowd of anger, the sole smiling
forced to cower

within corners of malevolent confinement.



Painters’ Exhalations 92

                         —after Susan Constanse’s In the Aftermath


In the aftermath
absence curls its shadowless
monuments around the pupils
too aware of conscious perception.
             Chairs lined
criminal profiles with messenger
witnesses too afraid to sit
or compose facial feature
recognition.
       Bodies reside here
only by name tiptoeing memory

thus
   façade panels
             the weakened room
                         allowing

for the dead to reborn selves

after dust dissipates
           revealing
tabula rasa

skin
akin
to conception ensuing saddened death,
mother pounding questions.


Felino Soriano is a case manager working with developmentally and physically disabled adults in California. He is the editor of the online journal, Counterexample Poetics, which focuses on International interpretations of experimental poetry, art, and photography.