Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

poem

1966, NYC; nothing like it.

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by Diana Morley.

Walking down Broadway
on a sultry June evening
going to an off-Broadway play
with a few friends. I wear
a long white cotton nightgown
with embroidered yellow flowers.

We sweep by two guys
weaving, waving bagged bottles
when one stares at my gown
and says, “Oh, I do believe
an angel has just passed by!”

We giggle passing others
wearing whatever might
provoke a second look
then watch an Albee play
about the modern condition.

We leave somber, returning
to our 7th Avenue loft
over the subway at 28th
mulling over our own ideas
to work out our social ills—

to be honest, none as good
as my white nightgown.

Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.

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by Gale Acuff. and at our church go to Heaven or Hell and Heaven’s nicer but Hell might not be so bad since so many souls are there says our Sunday School teacher and it’s likely that that’s where I’ll go when I die since I sin a lot for only ten years old, I’m […]

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 […]

Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.

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by Cliff Beck. My skin, nose and eyes sense trillions of photo-electric stimuli which my mind will synthesise and simplify to create blue skies, warm bread; every experience that fills my head with memories, generating thoughts, intuitions and future visions. But the more I think the more separated, more complicated I become sat in my […]

12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.

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by John Van Pelt. 1. The leavening sky. 2. Aunt Carol’s deep-dish ironware pie plate she had since Chicago days with a graying chip off the rim and a capacity suggestive of doubling any modern recipe. Not that Carol ever looked at a recipe, her hooked wrist and crabbed fingers dancing with impossible deftness, scooping […]

Broad Street.

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by Rosalie Hendon. Broken glass spills into constellations on the sidewalk It glitters in the afternoon sun fierce and beautiful too sharp to touch To walk here is to pray Let me not be cut Let me not break  

A Death in Alexandria.

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by Gail White. Why did we kill Hypatia?   Was philosophy that big a threat to the Christian faith? We managed to combine it with Plato, why not with Plotinus as well?   Was it because she had beauty as well as intellect? Was that reason enough to scrape the flesh from her bones?   […]

My Forked Tongue.

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by Clarissa Jakobsons.   Playful butterflies check milkweed plants then fly away like shooting stars turning Venus and Saturn upside down. Rainwater cleanses my hair. I rub cooked oatmeal into maple roots releasing crimson acrylics onto canvas. A disguised red hen answers the dead landline, stealing axe trimmed eggs with an axe. Neighbor foxes ravage […]

Swan Lake.

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by Bettina Sapien. I was insulted when you said I had a voice like an oboe. Then I remembered the oboe solo in the first act of Swan Lake. How it rises from the pit and serpentines up the aisle. Locates my seat and slides underneath. The summer voice of a friend calling up from […]

Long Division.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.   Laughter like wind chimes, how the sound carries. You can hear the party going on past the fence– were we there? When it was our turn, did we carry on so? Summon that feeling of weightlessness, invincibility. Overshadowed now by the wings of time. Consider the calendar by weeks and […]