Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

poem

We can’t use you.

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by Diana Morley.

If you don’t have a degree
we can’t use you.

Thirty matchbook cover cutouts
saved, rubberbanded, over decades.

I brought them along to each new house
tucked into a box with pencils and stamps
till they fell off my desk and the band broke.

Yellow-and-black comic-book images
show one man talking to another behind
a desk. On the backside is an ad for
a high school course—each cover’s the same.

Were those images saved for a poem
never written? …we can’t use you
does smack of scorn and exploitation
but thirty copies?

Oh, now I remember, saved for a collage
never created after art school years.

My art work’s no longer in style—sorry
comics, after all this time, I can’t use you.

 

Gen X Exegesis.

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by Sean Murphy. How else can our resilience be explained except by the video games we played— the early ‘80s offering us invaders from space on screen and nuclear apocalypse everywhere else (except when we were asleep, and that’s the lesson we learned, cable TV our textbook: death never rests), so even when you’re staying […]

SO WHAT IF THERE IS THE OCCASIONAL ACCIDENT.

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by John Grey. Broken dishes – are they a good laugh or grief? I love a woman who promised both and kept her word. So how do I adore the fragrance she wears today and yet despise tomorrow’s? I just accept them, good or bad. Same with the gifts. Same with her family. And all […]

Grandeval.

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by Cliff Beck. When the Hittites took Babylon I was not there nor did I fight in Iraq for Bush and Blair. I refused the cross, was never on crusade and bought no penance, yet still paid all my dues. I wasn’t seen when the great witch hunts were made and was never one to […]

Pop Song.

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by Virginia Bell. after Diane Seuss I met my father again in The Pleasure Chest on North Milwaukee, in the garden center on Clarke called Gethsemane, in a nightclub in Spain back when everyone was playing The Police on repeat, and he said to me, is that you, little chickadee, he said, like a monk […]

Aside.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli. Field of infinite whispers. Supple blades of pale sage,
the color of cat eyes. How they widen / wink in sunlight. It’s not always clear what is real. The past is ever present / now slips out from under us. Day at the shore, look out for the horizon. Memory traces a […]

Tail-end News.

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by Diana Morley. When an arctic air blast nears zero here maybe 60 under my desk near the door best to check tail-end news for the magic of an LOL! to warm up down to my toes. Today totally rewarding. A young Dutch chess player was fined for wearing canvas sneakers at a chess championship—as […]

Magic Missing.

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by Diana Morley. Sun not yet set rampaging winds whip the earth as if wanting to wipe off the whole mess and start over. Pleas from earth keepers torn apart—hanging chads pelted to the ground under a sweeping roar. Our planet, our home no child’s Magic Slate with pull-up plastic.

Long Shadow Thrown.

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by Guinotte Wise. For a smallish fellow I throw an impressively long shadow about five pm, but so does a blade of grass, a weed, a fencepost. Mine, however, reminds me of a photograph of marchers to Selma so many years ago. Heroic shadows. Long strides indicated. Unhesitating steps. Solidarity that shook certain worlds. They […]

Should Have Been.

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by Holly Day. Here is a little bird that should have been born but something happened to its sky-blue shell. There should have been feathers in that dark cavern, but there is only yolk and rubbery bone. One tiny malformed foot. If you hold the little broken egg up to the sky, it almost disappears […]