Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

EAP: The Magazine Archive

Long Division.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.

 

Laughter like wind chimes,
how the sound carries.
You can hear the party
going on past the fence–
were we there?
When it was our turn,
did we carry on so?

Summon that feeling
of weightlessness, invincibility.
Overshadowed now
by the wings of time.
Consider the calendar
by weeks and it overwhelms.
Invisibility has greater appeal
than it used to. By days?
Either way, a fraction
of a year, of a life–

We can divide our space,
divide our time,
measure how we like.
A long division, yet no distance
between past and present.

Let me be wholly happy
here on the patio swing.
Leaves waiting to be raked,
toy-strewn yard, laundry stacked inside,
train track snaking through the dining room,
pencil-scratched long division at the table.
How now, dear mess? Dear muse?

How to claim what a life amounts to?
The sum of our amusements
across all our days over time left.
A remainder yet unknown.

Time’s daughter rings the chimes again,
and our yard sings a song unto itself.

Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

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by Yahia Lababidi. Those for whom the natural is extraordinary tend to find the extraordinary natural. What we refer to as ‘the real world’ is often our failure of imagination. Poets are citizen journalists. Across millennia, the devil’s siren song remains unaltered: ‘Let it all burn!’ Know your Muse and its diet.   From “What […]

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 […]

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

Pareidolia Games.

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by Peter Onelio. Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our mind confronting them. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way   If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. […]

The Blank Spot in Our Brains.

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by Ellen Morris Prewitt. When my mother began to suffer from macular degeneration, her eye doctor told her she should no longer drive. She had a hole in her retina, but her brain would not let her see it as a hole. Her hard-working brain would use past data to predict what it thought should […]

Forgotten Female Scholars of Medieval Islam.

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by Zhinia Noorian and Brian Griffith. Back during the Arab–Persian Abbasid empire, before women were barred from religious leadership, we find records of many female officials or scholars. Queen Qatr al-Nada, the wife of caliph al Mu’tadid (r. 892–902 CE), served as court judge, passing verdicts on legal cases brought by the public at her […]

“You Always Remembered My Name!”

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by David D. Horowitz. During the past several decades various polls have exposed Americans’ ignorance about our history, constitution, and government. Do we forget too much or do we ignore too much? Or both? To forget one must first have remembered, but too few people commit to memorizing details unless they are about themselves. It […]

Shaggy Dog.

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by Bruce E.R. Thompson. What did the Sufi master say to the hotdog vender? Wait. I’m sorry, I seem to have forgotten the punchline to that joke. I must be getting old. Give me a minute. If I think for a bit, perhaps I’ll remember what I was going to say. It was going to […]