“Draco Urbis”

I promise, less than fifty percent of my poems are titled in Latin . . .

This one is interesting to me because it’s my second, or possibly even my third, run at the concept. For years I had in my head an idea about urban dragons, which I thought of as being in the same “setting” as my short stories “Such as Dreams Are Made Of,”, “The Memories Rise to Hunt,” and a third piece which I wound up trunking because it was one of my earliest efforts and not very good. (I put “setting” in quotes because all they really have in common is the effort to imagine the urban landscape generating folkloric creatures the way we’ve long attributed to the wilderness.)

I wrote a hundred words of prose to get the idea down in my head, but it never went anywhere past that because it didn’t have a plot. A full eighteen years later, having started writing poetry and realizing that some of those “it’s a nice idea, but I don’t have a plot” bitlets might be better suited to that approach, I wrote a tanka — a five-line Japanese form — based on the concept. About six months later, for reasons I no longer recall, I decided to try it again, this time as a mirror cinquain.

And that is the version that sold! “Draco Urbis” was published by Julia Rios in the June 2024 issue of Worlds of Possibility. It will also be reprinted in the 2025 Dwarf Stars award anthology.