DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Sisyphus Walks   Sisyphus lifts the thighbone of a god Above his head (a bone thick and long as A felled tree) and begins his trudge Across the hard-packed dust. Spills of silver fluid blanket uneven stone, Not pooling in hollows but spreading in Thin

The final bit of interior art for the upcoming issue is in. Paula Friedlander and Tim Mullins came up with one illustration each for Elissa Malcohn’s “The Last Dragon Slayer,” creating an interesting (and deliberate) contrast….

Another domestic poem, born out of nothing more than strange noises regularly heard at night outside my window in the very office where I now sit.  The poem’s approach owes a great debt to the wonderful ending of Thomas Ligotti’s horror story “Nethescurial,” which is

My short story “The Button Bin” is now available online in its entirety at Apex Magazine.

No One   I do not hear a tapping beside me at the window. I will not raise the shade. I will not see eyes there, silver with reflected moonlight, the same eyes that flashed outside the attic window as I peered up the dark

A real-life version of this poem actually happened to us, years ago. A teller at our bank mistyped our account number, causing a deposit to vanish into non-existent account limbo. And of course when we wrote checks based on the not-unreasonable assumption that our money

Disaster at the BrainBank™ ATM   We’re sorry, we’ve misfiled your personality, and deposited your childhood memories in someone else’s account. We warned you: we’ve just upgraded, you must protect your own persona till the bugs smooth out. It seems you’ve far surpassed your limit

This poem means to be a reversal of the typical poet-muse relationship; I once called it an “anti-muse” poem and was corrected — by a YouTube commenter! — that it’s still a tribute, in its own way. And for some reason, I slipped in a

Hey, folks, two things. First, as you might have guessed by now, Mythic Delirium 24 isn’t going to make its target release date of April. These things happen in the realm of DIY small press projects … I’m waiting on cover artist Tim Mullins to

Giving Back to the Muse   She wears a necklace of knives and eyes, a sash sewn from flags and faces, boots welded from bomb fragments, a belt of hangman’s rope. You fear she’ll see you watching but you can’t look away, not even once