Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

EAP: The Magazine Archive

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 […]

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 […]

Giving Back to the Earth: The First Bite.

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by Salvatore Folisi. THE MODERN WESTERN MIND operates mainly through the channels of rationality and reason. Because we seem to have attained a status of virtual mastery over our environment to acquire what we need or want, we have little interest in the more profound dimensions of that living environment, the limitless beings of nature, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Step, step, step, step, step…

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by Marie Davies & Margaret Hultz. Best Mary could remember on this unforgivingly, hot August day was that she met Juan Diego on a Monday. He was an interesting young man; more miles had passed under his feet than the average person. Great calluses rimmed Diego’s well-traveled feet, lifting him an additional four inches off […]

Lost Trademark: The Beginning.

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by R.C. Savoie. I was watching the cult’s traffic boy sweating his ass off in the street. He was stuffed in a tuxedo like my own but with a reflective orange bib that comically failed to reach his cummerbund. His job was to direct a growing line of limousines up LesJardin Castle’s driveway arc one […]

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. […]