DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Last week I mentioned a poetry sale to a market so new it didn’t yet have an URL. Well, inkscrawl now has a URL, http://www.inkscrawl.net/, where submission guidelines can be found. Go check them out.

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

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

The cruellest month is over! So I wound up posting fourteen free poems total in honor of National Poetry Month — and mini-posts about the making of most of them — for no greater reason than the thought that it might be a fun thing

This poem, the thirteenth and final piece in my impromptu National Poetry Month series, is practically a fanfic — an unofficial coda of sorts to Laird Barron’s kickass horror novella “Procession of the Black Sloth,” directly inspired by that story’s final moments. It’s a fun

The Thirteenth Hell ma-13thhell Her voice in my ear said, look, look. Though I squeezed my eyelids shut, hid my face in my hands, I could still see it. I pressed my fingernails in, hooked my thumbs and pulled, like so many here before. And