Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Exangel

Swan Lake.

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by Bettina Sapien.

I was insulted when you said I had a voice like an oboe. Then I remembered the oboe solo in the first act of Swan Lake. How it rises from the pit and serpentines up the aisle. Locates my seat and slides underneath. The summer voice of a friend calling up from the street, can you come out?

How about when you said the sound of my heart beating was like the tap of twenty-five white crested ballerinas on pointe. The rat-a-tat of rain drops on a wooden porch.  Revelation sized drops that don’t touch each other when they fall, because they fall straight down.

I sit in the balcony. The violins begin. Wood and string forge ribbons of light. Those ribbons climb a ladder, push open a gate, and the grey pearl sky pours in. I am not discouraged. I am uplifted. We had a piece of that shimmering sound.

My Forked Tongue.

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by Clarissa Jakobsons.   Playful butterflies check milkweed plants then fly away like shooting stars turning Venus and Saturn upside down. Rainwater cleanses my hair. I rub cooked oatmeal into maple roots releasing crimson acrylics onto canvas. A disguised red hen answers the dead landline, stealing axe trimmed eggs with an axe. Neighbor foxes ravage […]

A Death in Alexandria.

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by Gail White. Why did we kill Hypatia?   Was philosophy that big a threat to the Christian faith? We managed to combine it with Plato, why not with Plotinus as well?   Was it because she had beauty as well as intellect? Was that reason enough to scrape the flesh from her bones?   […]

Broad Street.

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by Rosalie Hendon. Broken glass spills into constellations on the sidewalk It glitters in the afternoon sun fierce and beautiful too sharp to touch To walk here is to pray Let me not be cut Let me not break  

12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.

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by John Van Pelt. 1. The leavening sky. 2. Aunt Carol’s deep-dish ironware pie plate she had since Chicago days with a graying chip off the rim and a capacity suggestive of doubling any modern recipe. Not that Carol ever looked at a recipe, her hooked wrist and crabbed fingers dancing with impossible deftness, scooping […]

Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.

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by Cliff Beck. My skin, nose and eyes sense trillions of photo-electric stimuli which my mind will synthesise and simplify to create blue skies, warm bread; every experience that fills my head with memories, generating thoughts, intuitions and future visions. But the more I think the more separated, more complicated I become sat in my […]

True (from “My Life with Dogs”).

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by Tod Davies. She was a floppy, affectionate, shy dog. A kind of Buddhist dog, really, in her approach to life. Black and white and gray like her father, who she followed around worshipfully. I still remember the delight I felt in watching them dig a hole together in the front meadow. Happy, grinning away, […]

Welcome to 2025. Persist.

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When I began The History of Arcadia visionary fiction series with a children’s book from another world, footnoted by its physicists, I wrote about a world formed by a fairy tale, by someone remembering who they really were. And in that book, and the succeeding ones (YA novel, literary novel, science fiction novel), there was […]

Power Gratifies Itself.

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by Benjamin White. It appears History is irrelevant When memory stretches All the way back To a few minutes ago, Forgetting and overlooking The cause and effect Of important events And situations As reactions And responses Operate in a void Where power Gratifies itself

Willie and Nemo (from “My Life with Dogs”).

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by Tod Davies. I lived in Los Angeles for eight years. I didn’t learn to drive until about six years in, when my then husband gifted me with a little Fiat convertible missing its top. It cost $250, it was bright red, and when it choked on Sunset Boulevard as I drove it to school […]