Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Exangel

Maiden Voyage.

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by Richard Fein.

It was all pain at first,
a throbbing under the shoulder blades,
two lumps erupting from the flesh
growing with cancer-like exuberance.
He could no longer sleep on his back
even when sleep was possible.
First the tips appeared,
pink and fingerlike, thoroughly ridiculous.
No doctor would have believed it; he didn’t himself.
His doorbell was no longer answered.
Letters fell out of the stuffed mailbox; flyers piled on the doorstep.
The tips became wings. Wings grew silvery feathers.
A metamorphosis from the freakish to the majestic.
And then he climbed to his roof.
Below him the authorities were beating down his door.
But above, there on the roof he became so poised,
but poised for what—
Soaring eagle or Icarus? Ascending Gabriel or fallen Lucifer?
Miraculous ascension or flight of fancy?
All he could do was flap his fledgling wings and jump.

Migraines.

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by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois.   Maybe it’s because I grew up poor in Mississippi The day before a migraine I want to eat dirt   I find myself out in the garden fighting to restrain my urges   Then come the holes in my vision the sizzling light   the world a nauseating blur throbbing […]

Firsts.

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This issue of EAP: The Magazine features a memorial picture of Laika, the first dog sent into space, and we feel in solidarity with that dog, although a good deal luckier. We’re into celebrating Firsts, and fortunately for us, our reality is a bit more controllable than Laika’s was for him—i.e. no being shot into […]

First Comes Winter: Get a Rake.

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by Debbie Naples. Noise and death normally don’t go together in most people’s minds. In most people’s minds, death is a startling unending silence, an infinite pause, a landscape of deafness…death has no sound. Unless you consider the leaf blower and dead leaves, and the wood chipper and dead trees, and the tree stump and […]

Paying Attention.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.   Your hands fit inside my palm and in your mouth— so you read your world and I redefine my own. I will learn the names of trees for you, look up words I thought I knew, scale mountains. Almost overnight, a sharp white ridge tenders your pink gums. My pain […]

I Love Tripe (especially Menudo).

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As some of you may know, my freezer is the sly receptacle of all sorts of foods that have caught my attention in one way or the other, waiting for the happy day when I can meld them into something I hope will be delicious. So when I got home to the winter Oregon woods, […]

Soad's Story: A Journey Into the Sky.

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by Robin Wyatt Dunn. I am Soad and this is my story. What I experience here is the record of my journey into the wormhole. Our Visitors, like the gods of the ancients, arrange for us poor humans various tests. This test of mine is one of escape; one I have undertaken for my people. […]

Threnody.

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by Robert Markland Smith. You walk down a country road, on a windy fall day; the leaves are circling around you, blown about by the augur of winter. You approach the gate of the abandoned garden where the corpses lie. Your hair is blowing in the wind, whipped around by every gust. You stick your […]

Animal Wars: Our Original Cat Friends.

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by Brian Griffith. Our modern awareness of disease makes us extremely averse to scavenging dead meat. We usually assume that hunters eat only fresh-killed beasts. But African lions and Bushpeople never had such a rule, and it seems they shared each others’ kills. Concerning the big cats’ food, in 1969, George Schaller and Gordon Lowther […]

Apostrophe.

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by Kirsten Rian.   The first word spoken on the moon was okay I’ve begun quoting you, that’s the language—now The first telegraph message tapped by Samuel Morse, what hath God wrought? The first words spoken over the telephone by Alexander Bell, Watson, please come here. I want you The first words spoken by Thomas Edison […]