Because it’s National Poetry Day, a poem by me.


This first appeared years ago in the online speculative publication Strange Horizons, and was my very first professional sale. It is particularly appropriate to what I am reading and researching right now for The Quantum League, so it seemed a fitting time to re-post it.

In Their Element

It’s a Saturday night

at the Accelerator Club.

The band is playing a quantum reel,

while atoms trade photons and gravitons

like dance cards.

Particles particular about how they interact

are pulled together,

or forced apart.

Some nights are slow,

relatively speaking,

weighed down with talk of dark matters,

while others are a frenzy, a frenetic exchange

of flirts and whispers

of who’s coming together and who’s breaking up.

But it is never dull.

There is always the chance

of a spectacle;

the nobility passing through

without so much as a condescending nod,

or some unstable debutante coming apart

under the pressure,

and you should see the chaos on the floor when

dancers collide.


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