“To the Angels Alone”

Friends of mine used to say that anything which happens three times is tradition.

I guess that means I have a tradition of selling poetry, now.

This one came out of a “contest” in the Codex Writers’ Group — I put that word in quotes because the only prize you get is the warm glow of knowing you had the highest average rating across the event. This particular contest, Victory in Verse, simply requires you to write a poem inspired by one of the prompts (e.g. an image, an article, or a list of words) that fits the strictures for that week (e.g. less than twenty lines of free verse, or less than twenty lines of form poetry, etc). During the 2023 contest, one of the prompts was an article about some newly-discovered and newly-deciphered letters from Mary, Queen of Scots.

This immediately sent my thoughts to the Onyx Court series. Mary never appears onstage there, but the events leading up to her execution are influenced by the fae . . . could I write an Onyx Court poem about that somehow?

Well, not exactly. Victory in Verse is an anonymous contest, so even though I wasn’t sure if anybody participating had read that series (turns out at least one person had), I felt like I couldn’t tie it too obviously to my fiction. The resulting poem, however, is still very much about the fae, and about Mary’s relationship with them — or lack thereof.

It was published by Augur Magazine in September 2024, and you can read it for free online!