Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Barry Vitcov

A Dangerous Scent.

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by Barry Vitcov.

Sitting on a creek-side boulder just after daybreak. Light filtering through dewy air like sprinkles on a donut. It’s cool, crisp, and green as he watches for a pair of river otters seen the day before when the fog would not retreat. He is being still, shoulders relaxed, a non-aggressive posture allowing the stream to flow undisturbed. Suddenly slight movements and two otters flip like unattainable nymphs. He tenses with delight.

While behind a tree
blending in with subtlety
among cottonwoods
a crouching force of nature
a fearful feral bouquet

Mirrored Images.

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by Barry Vitcov. When a mirror faces another mirror in just the right position, mirror images are captured from here to endless perspective, meaning infinity is a concept captured in glass and silver, aluminum, or other shiny coatings. This not unlike two lovers who find just the right position to face one another, thus developing […]

Passages.

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by Barry Vitcov.   Regardless of how hard you try the second hand still clicks seconds the minute hand sweeps minutes but the hour hand seems to quicken a beat each day Your old watch crystal reflects fleeting images, the façade of memories like ephemeral glitters a morphing countenance transformed with the tick-tock rhythm of […]

Fooling Days.

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by Barry Vitcov. What did you save when the sun set later than the day before? Were the colors muted, less vivid or spectacular? A blur of lengthening shadows? Do longer days rise or set more gradually, with subdued edges. Do we become more indistinct in daylight? More defined in the dark like etchings in […]

Dream Shapes.

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by Barry Vitcov. I was floating like a cloud, vaporous edges changing shapes, positions accommodating soft and hard winds, amused by other surrounding forces before waking as opaque panels of tin, a box kite tethered, not subject to whimsy, while spooled in and out by pilots with a sense of weather, musing whether or not […]

What Binds Us.

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by Barry Vitcov. These times are not about finding your socks in the vegetable bin or cauliflower in the sock drawer Those are simply lapses of distraction No, these times are about forgetting: doctrines, precedents, understanding, social mores, kindness, do unto others It’s about trying to remember permanence, values, empathy, commonality, and a social contract […]

Advice to the Distressed.

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by Barry Vitcov. Filled with the allure of double rainbows, my dreams are often in technicolor; sometimes fanciful with bright lights aglow, other times a transparent watercolor. Your dreams are nightmares filled with fear and dread, the kind that wake you in the chill of night and cause you to shake yourself from your bed […]

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 […]

Control.

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by Barry Vitcov. The desire is to hold control and, once achieved, sustain control. It’s the moral dilemma facing those who wish to maintain control with the likes of an intelligence built by those who once defamed control. Building a thinking machine, the dream of making easy the chain of control may have unleashed the […]

Identity.

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by Barry Vitcov. reflections in a pond only half the story rippling, fluttering, mutations like the emergence of butterfly wings hearing a lullaby which sings half a story the other half standing projecting the captured image two halves make one a magician and his other half what is seen what he wants to be