Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

poem

Spinning Yarn.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.

 

I have wished myself a weaver.
Kept scraps, cottons and wools,
lines from old notebooks,
letters, dream whisps,
Images I could fit in
to turn out something fresh.
Is it stealing to take from ourselves?
Or is it preserving, persevering?
Does everything have a breaking point?
We’ll be overrun if we keep it all.
Tighten the yarn, hold the line.
Hem and haw, avoid eye-contact.
A question can offer closure
or an opening. Transformation
is one answer. It seems to go
like this with emerging doubt:
like pulling a loose end, until—

A Leaf of Discovery.

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by Benjamin White. Despair wanders and stumbles Into Truth With proof challenging The given, The taken, And the acceptable While changing certainty Into a leaf falling Saddened by The circumstance of seasons When chance analyzes The reasons why Honesty has chosen To distance itself From the face And facts Of reality As a paradox Of […]

WHO ARE YOU.

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by John Grey.   I’m barely in the shop and the girl behind the Starbucks counter is already filling my order, me being predictable and she, only eighteen or so, with a gift of knowing who gets what, an instinct to match a migrating bird’s. I drink my latte alone at a table in a […]

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 […]

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 … […]

Tinnitus.

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by Edward Johnson.   A buzzing has ensued, a harbinger, a glitchy modem, the air thickened by gossip. The drydock is encrusted in bivalves so of course there are those among us who suspect we’re being listened to. A skiff riffles into the silvery suture where sea meets sky. The data-mining mollusks quiver – desalinated, […]

Escaping the Dream.

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by Cliff Beck.   We live the dream in a land where things are not what they seem; where the here and now is discarded for a sacred cow; a future sold in a sequence of seductive social memes which the panopticon uses to accuse, judge and abuse if we can’t afford it, or try […]

Hourly.

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by John Grey. The hour is strung out worse than me, in the remains of night’s gutter. And sleep’s a disease I can’t quite catch, so I lie here, part solitary, part every restless human being extant. Sheets and blankets fall off me like old lovers. The pillow squeezes my skull. Thoughts bust through the […]