Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

poem

Roots Twisted.

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by JW James.

 

like DNA spirals all the stories in my dreams
family trips to St. Joseph’s stepping
around gopher holes in the cemetery lawn
we always got lost it wasn’t like

they changed the place around on us
what is exhausting in a cemetery?
the stillness requires you to travel
great distances until finally we’d find

the two families the Irish section
a few rows from the Ukrainian we’d
stand there a few minutes dazed and
uninspired not much sense of respect

or prayer left in us so we’d pile into
the car and head for Rose Bakery
my dad would come out with a big
white box full of donuts that was

lunch confectioners sugar and jelly
chocolate and cream what is it about
a cemetery the grammar of the dead
carved into granite we always get

lost we want the sweet stuff and
voodoo we need seances to read
that grammar we want to pan for gold
we want our teeth gold-rimmed

 

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 […]

Removal.

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by Lance Mazmanian.   To wake in a shipwreck has dimensions to sort. Time is always near, never far. The shore is unknown and has nothing to offer, to anyone. I have walked up and down, back and forward, deep into surf and rocks that themselves seem lost. If only the Celtic Sea again, lights […]

Indefinitely.

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by Cheryl Vargas.   The legal size manilla envelope is too long to fit in the basket alongside my other folders, its size is as awkward as its contents. Inside are two long pieces of paper weightless, a sparrow’s feather. I am pretty sure my brother’s death certificate can be shredded now. Five years is […]

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 […]

Saving Daylight.

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by Benjamin White. The Golden Age Is gilded greed, So save your integrity In a shoebox Under your bed Or in your top drawer With your secret hopes, Or buried In te back yard Where you mind And memories Intersect and meet To redirect the heat you feel When you peel the sunshine From the […]

The Gone Years.

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by Richard LeDue. The 1960s and 70s are dead like an old drunk who killed their liver to save their heart, only to die of in a car accident while complaining about seatbelts to an empty whisky bottle, and the 1980s still alive, pissing into a bag and calling the nurse “Midge,” which leaves death […]

It was simpler, then.

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by Rosalie Hendon.   Gazing through time and memories Up you went on the swingset through the summer afternoon warm with the droning of bees, a gulf didn’t gape between us then Water was just water, not a thing you could drown in  

On the Bench by the River.

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by Lana Hechtman Ayers.   My husband embraces our little dog as she flops baby-seal-like in his lap, sun so bright on her head, the tips of her black fur iridesce to pink and purple. She’s warm as a summer-plump berry. Eyes blinking closed, open, closed. Scents only a dog can sense, her nose twitches […]

Pull back the curtains and open the door.

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by Cliff Beck. Weary of winter mornings filled with the dark confusion that underscored the night before we long to see Helios climbing high, illuminating our lives as his fiery chariot crosses the summer sky. Yet as soon as rosy fingered Eos calls us from our beds we change the time, banish the lark, bring […]