DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

My brain is scrambled by the opposing forces of a virus invasion and the drugs that fight them, but I’m just coherent enough to make mention that I’ve sold another of the “Claire-dare” poems, “Heart’s Delight,” to Not One of Us. This poem in particular

Just a quick note that next edition of “Poetry Planet” at StarShipSofa will, as I understand, contain two poems by me, that you could call Golden Oldies: “On Discovery of a Habitable World” (which is, actually, the first sf poem I ever wrote, though it

I’m pleased to announce that a short, eerie poem I co-wrote with Anita (her idea, my words) called “Unland, Unlife” has just sold to the electronic poetry zine inkscrawl, edited by Mitchell Hart, which is so new it doesn’t yet have a URL. More information

T.J. McIntyre’s Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction — all proceeds from which go to the Red Cross to help with tornado relief in the South — is out now on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle, with stories and poems from a cutting edge and up-and-coming roster including

Sam Tomaino at SF Revu tackles the stories in Apex Magazine 23 and makes mention of my “Button Bin“: “The Button Bin” by Mike Allen (originally appeared in Helix: Speculative Fiction Quarterly, 2007) is quite the horror story. Our narrator is after a man named

I learned tonight, to my delight, that Fantastique Unfettered is also accepting my poem “Binary.” This is a surreal, dark magic- and dark relationship-themed piece, another of the “Claire-dare” poems, inspired by this painting shown to me by Claire Cooney.

Dan Campbell, poetry editor for Durham, N.C. magazine Bull Spec informed me this morning that he’s accepting my poem “Sad Wisps of Empty Smoke.” The title comes from John Hall Wheelock’s “Sunday Evening in the Common,” but the topic is quasi-personal — with all the

I’m pleased to announce the sale of my poem “Sisyphus Crawls” to the new speculative fiction/poetry market Fantastique Unfettered. And congratulations to fellow poet Alexandra Seidel, who was appointed Poetry Editor there just days ago. “Sisyphus Crawls” is a part of what I call the

Actually, it’s too bad there isn’t a quick, snappy word akin to “killer” that conveys the concept of a fate worse that death. I’ve just finished a new draft of “The Quiltmaker,” the sequel to “The Button Bin.” It was originally a lumbering 18,000 words.

When I saw that T.J. McIntyre decided to resurrect his zine Southern Fried Weirdness as a Kindle anthology with all proceeds to go to tornado relief, I realized I might have something that would fit in with that project right well. And as it turns