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A thousand Persephones lie bleeding in the Lethe,

a thousand more cross on Charon's armada,

proud brows gleaming, hair windswept,

the first shawls they made once they taught themselves to knit

clutched to their shoulders, flak-jacket secure.

Behind the sandbags crouch the grunts of Hades, primed to feed

a thousand chains of regret through greasy barrels.

We peer through sniper slots

at the enemy's gowned grace,

shudder, rub our hands, wish for breath

to warm our palms, wait sadly for the order

to serve the feast.


His first short story collection, The Button Bin and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Dagan Books, and his first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, is slated to come out from Black Gate. His short fiction has appeared most recently in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Not One of Us, with more on the way in Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction. Many more of his poems can be found in the Strange Horizons archives.



Mike Allen is president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and editor of the speculative poetry journal Mythic Delirium. With Roger Dutcher, Mike is also editor of The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, which for the first time collects the Rhysling Award-winning poems from 1978 to 2004 in one volume. His newest poetry collection, Disturbing Muses, is out from Prime Books, with a second collection, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead, soon to follow. Mike's poems can also be found in Nebula Awards Showcase 2005, both editions of The 2005 Rhysling Anthology, and the Strange Horizons archives.
Current Issue
27 Nov 2023

you no longer have image. in photos your cheek² sharpens, vectors.
That cis-tem is now only a speck.
Mushrooms didn’t exactly sweep sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, but much like their real-world inspiration they persisted, growing in the damp, dark crevices of the creative minds of every generation. They were a template for the anxieties of each age, seasoned with the fears of the era.
Stories of extensive evil, in which the threat is not a single villain, nor even a man-made pollution monster, but systemic structures of harm in which we are all complicit, offer tools to think through real-life problems, which are rarely fixed by defeating one villain.
Writing While Disabled 
Well, when people say writing every day, I think some people take it too literally. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about writing every day. People use the term dailyness to mean consistency. Write Consistently. Time-wise, write consistently. You build a practice. Because remember what I said earlier, a writer is someone who writes. It's about being in the present. Writing has to be a present practice for you. That's all it means.
My most hearty and luxurious greetings fam, hope all are doing well. Friends, I feel like I often start this column by saying I can’t remember what happened in the previous episode. Today, I honestly cannot remember a single thing that happened last time. Fam, so many things happened lately and my brain has been all over the place. I had to move! I am getting too old for this kind of lifestyle and now I’m not going to unpack anything because I will just have to repack and move again at some point. I don’t know if that is
Wednesday: Angel of Death: Dearly Departed by Ralynn Kimie 
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