Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

EAP: The Magazine Archive

For an Acquaintance and His Wife with Alzheimer’s.

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by Barry Vitcov.

Who are you to say I would not be there?
After all these years, you still have some doubt
that in the end, when the world seems unfair,
you would be abandoned and left without
someone knowing well your questions and fears.
Although we’ve often talked of the unknown,
with worry in our hearts and eyes with tears,
we still don’t understand being alone
when being together was what we had planned.
Then we were taken to a darker place
where science and reason could not command
answers to what we were forced to embrace.
Knowing faith is as tangible as hope
keeps alive our loving bonds as we cope.

Straight.

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by Holly Day. There is a stretch of highway in Kansas where the guy who was responsible for painting the line down the middle of the road fell asleep and drove into a field instead. It’s not usually a problem to pass this spot in the daytime, although if you’ve been following that white line […]

Mother May I.

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by John Van Pelt. There’s always red, double-deckers resolved from fog and granite, the boy’s glasses blearing city lights in slashes of impasto, no holiday cheer but reaches his ears in a sodden frenzy, clots of pleasantries pinched off by tinkling bells, muted all beneath the threadbare coverlet of incessant rain. He’s late to a […]

Imprints.

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by Diana Morley. Swearing at the arctic blast fast-freezing my nose to toes— laughing at my old fridge whining pitifully ice cubes clinging together, chilling. Late afternoon still a hard shine on the dark-watered lake frozen overnight hiding life and depths. Backyard snow reflecting sunlight into my home till early evening, the bright white cover […]

We can’t use you.

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by Diana Morley. If you don’t have a degree we can’t use you. Thirty matchbook cover cutouts saved, rubberbanded, over decades. I brought them along to each new house tucked into a box with pencils and stamps till they fell off my desk and the band broke. Yellow-and-black comic-book images show one man talking to […]

Gen X Exegesis.

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by Sean Murphy. How else can our resilience be explained except by the video games we played— the early ‘80s offering us invaders from space on screen and nuclear apocalypse everywhere else (except when we were asleep, and that’s the lesson we learned, cable TV our textbook: death never rests), so even when you’re staying […]

SO WHAT IF THERE IS THE OCCASIONAL ACCIDENT.

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by John Grey. Broken dishes – are they a good laugh or grief? I love a woman who promised both and kept her word. So how do I adore the fragrance she wears today and yet despise tomorrow’s? I just accept them, good or bad. Same with the gifts. Same with her family. And all […]

Grandeval.

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by Cliff Beck. When the Hittites took Babylon I was not there nor did I fight in Iraq for Bush and Blair. I refused the cross, was never on crusade and bought no penance, yet still paid all my dues. I wasn’t seen when the great witch hunts were made and was never one to […]

The sookies.

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by DS Maolalai. my uncle had hands strong as wood, sawn from an old cork tree. knuckles and tufts stiff as knots on a riverboat siding and children as tough as him, gristly and growing as strong. it must have been strange for him, showing this city child animals which he kept for nothing but […]

Grandfathered In.

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by Katherine Olsen. The alcohol running through my veins started in my grandfather’s. Who said that my inheritance would only come from grandma’s side? I never understood why my father would never watch us playing catch, I couldn’t understand why mom sent me off to grandpa, made me ask. My skinned knees trophies of athleticism, […]