Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Exangel

The Longest Day.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.

 

Light dwindles, your smile brightens.
You should be in bed, instead
we’re running through the grass.
A wild breeze kicks up.
Cotton candy clouds
witness our spinning games
and laughter. I want to keep
us in this togetherness
that fills me up
so there’s no room left for worries
(words I should have said, anxious habits,
what I’m doing wrong, what debts).
How to reign this momentum?
I’m savoring these last rays,
your sun-streaked hair,
saving daylight like a roll of pennies
for a lonely rainy day,
like I can keep up,
like I’m banking time
won’t run out on me.

 

Saved enough.

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by Diana Morley.   Am I frugal? As in do I not buy lattes wasting my earnings, my savings?  Of course! So frugal I make coffee only once a day, half a scoop, several drops of lowfat milk  so frugal, though widowed, I let only a few tears fall any one day to save some […]

The Hands of My Three Great Aunts.

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by Gail White.   Their skin was liver-spotted, bruised, wrinkled, the veins so prominent I was repelled. I was a child and they were old, long-widowed, shapeless, generous, kindly, full of tales and folklore, old Southern ladies who never put a hat on the bed in all their lives, because that was unlucky. To me, […]

Pull back the curtains and open the door.

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by Cliff Beck. Weary of winter mornings filled with the dark confusion that underscored the night before we long to see Helios climbing high, illuminating our lives as his fiery chariot crosses the summer sky. Yet as soon as rosy fingered Eos calls us from our beds we change the time, banish the lark, bring […]

On the Bench by the River.

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by Lana Hechtman Ayers.   My husband embraces our little dog as she flops baby-seal-like in his lap, sun so bright on her head, the tips of her black fur iridesce to pink and purple. She’s warm as a summer-plump berry. Eyes blinking closed, open, closed. Scents only a dog can sense, her nose twitches […]

It was simpler, then.

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by Rosalie Hendon.   Gazing through time and memories Up you went on the swingset through the summer afternoon warm with the droning of bees, a gulf didn’t gape between us then Water was just water, not a thing you could drown in  

The Gone Years.

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by Richard LeDue. The 1960s and 70s are dead like an old drunk who killed their liver to save their heart, only to die of in a car accident while complaining about seatbelts to an empty whisky bottle, and the 1980s still alive, pissing into a bag and calling the nurse “Midge,” which leaves death […]

Corso Umberto.

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by Charles S. Kraszewski.   Every morning at 8:15 they pack themselves into the red sardine can number 122 with their rafts plastic soccer balls beach umbrellas folding boards with cheap sunglasses and their own black bodies to doze all the way to Fontane Bianche. There, they’ll wander up and down the beach with inflatable […]

A Note to Future Ovids.

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by Charles S. Kraszewski. My father said, When I die I’d like to come back as a hawk turning gyres high on the thermals of the summer air. What a way for a Catholic to talk. My Dad? Metempsychosis? Go figure. But, playing along, as for me, I’d dare aspire (no offence intended to any […]

The Impressionist Period and Beyond.

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by Bruce E.R. Thompson. There is a period of our cultural history that has fallen through the cracks, and I believe it deserves our attention. Carving the history of culture into “periods” is a dicey enterprise; but, like the strata in rocks, cultural history does have discernible layers, and it can sometimes be very illuminating […]