Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Fall 2026: Emerging Doubt.

I Do Not Want To Be Stretched Like Music Wrung from a Dropped Seed.

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by Lana Hechtman Ayers.

—inspired by Charles Wright, “Clear Night”

 

Clear night, angel moon dons its halo rising overhead.
If the lucky winds choose someone else tonight.
If God takes a paddle to his favorite child.

It’s nearly time for my body’s demise.
The page knows this truth better than anyone.
This page sun fades and time erodes to dust.

How often I wished on stars and dandelion
fluff to be other than a dark-skinned girl
full of blasphemy and poetry
indistinguishable from noise.

How often I felt strung up by
the seasons’ bright interludes.
I was the ignored apple
rotting in the grass.

I was the girl eschewing speech.
Now I am a crow arguing with sky.

 

Looking into the fire.

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by Cliff Beck. In the long hours of darkness humanity huddles around flickering flames, aching bones pressed against unyielding stones, while shrieks and growls fill the night with fright. Then the heavens reflect the firelight as aurora borealis fills the sky and mortals begin to understand why, where from, and what’s to come after the […]

“Togetherness”.

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by Richard LeDue.   Stepping out of the summer sun into an air-conditioned liquor store- the coolness sharper than the cheap whisky I usually bought (they were sold out of it), only to be the last one to realize my shoelace was untied, and as I talked to myself, reading over wine prices and countries […]

Ashland, One Spring Day.

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by Barry Vitcov. I remember when there was a blue sky hovering, cloudless, over North Mountain Park. A backdrop for walking alone by mixed-age groups playing soccer so certain in who they were and what they were doing. I’m thinking there must be more than soccer, much more than feints, foot dribbling, and heading … […]