Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

EAP: The Magazine Archive

Two by Two on the Trail.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.

We scale what was once
a mountain too high.

I wonder when will enough be
enough for you, knowing full well

I want another go, too.
Not a one of us wants to be told

no. How that long o
echoes off the granite

as we beckon you to turn around.
Time to go home.

But what use is time for you?
What other word could mean less

when you are living in the moment,
operating by emotions,

yet to learn how
all your moments

will stitch together.
How time and memories

stretch and fold for you
to carry them all at once.

You run ahead
to jump off a redwood stump.

You don’t think to look back.
I catch up

while part of me is already
thinking of once, again.

Shadow (from “My Life with Dogs”)

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by Tod Davies.   Shadow told me her name before we ever saw her. It was her real name, too. Not the name they’d given her in the shelter where she’d done so badly that they sent her to the dog orphanage in the Arizona desert—Fedwell Farms, run by Carrie Wright, who is close to […]

Kintsugi.

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by Ed Ahern. Our vessels are broken early on by stresses outside and internal, leaking energy and intentions more and more as we fill them with the desired and the despised. Craftsmen who claim repair are almost always maladroit. We must with clumsy hands attempt gold seamed wholeness for our flawed earthenware.

Female Icons of Medieval Persia.

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by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian.   It’s widely assumed that women in medieval Persia were powerless, illiterate, and cloistered, and some of them were. But accounts from those times also show a host of bold, brilliant, or powerful women who made their marks on the country’s history and folklore. Here we give four brief […]

Sea.

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by Jeff Howard.   In the playground, a small sea of grass and child voices, I circulate in slow eddies and drift, helpless, in a larger pattern of green too slow for the eye to see, until at last, helpless, I reach the stacked-rock wall that rings the sea. My eye settles there, my hand […]

What a New Refrigerator Once Meant.

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by Lana Hechtman Ayers. Our vehicle for great adventures—a refrigerator carton rescued from the garbage pile at the curb in front of my best friend’s house. Wise and inventive Joann, five years older than me, wove myriad stories out of thin air, the way a line of robins suddenly appeared on electrical wires overhead. The […]

NOTHINGNESS.

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by John Tustin. How I’ve longed To not be me In my transgressions And helplessness And also To not be like God Who bears the weight Of his omniscience And his grand ambivalence But to be like The yogis pretend to be Or the lunatics sometimes are When they mumble Their curses and prayers With […]

We Still Have Once.

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by Barry Vitcov.   Once we wrote in sentences with hue-toned voice, punctuation as a choice and guide to pace and tempo and how to look-see from phrase to phrase. Once we wrote in sentences those secret notes passed in class like a psst, would you like to meet later? Hoping for a penciled reply […]

A Few Vignettes From the Taconite Shoals.

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by Chris Farago. At 7 pm dusk eclipsed the shoals, leaving Carlos and me to wonder whether the mute geese remained on the shore, or if those greyshorn hunters were successful. The tribulations at midnight were varied: filling the potatosacks with enough millet to last the week, fending off the malarial air, composing a toast […]

once.

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by Brendan McBreen. once   people would gather food and store it in little towers these little towers dotted the landscape and all was plentiful after a time some of these towers were combined into one big tower and it kept gobbling up the other towers until it was the only one left no one […]