by Lee Slonimsky

Relax into the wind,
no matter how cold.

Your atoms will spin all the faster
and keep you warm,
the glow of their buzz
pinpoint-electric.

What a song they chirp
in the wastes of January.

Your mastery of their empty spaces
fills your flesh with whirl,
a fantastically current imprint
of Big Bang’s ripples.

And here’s a tree once caught
in a whirlwind,
naked branches circled on high:

January’s stone,

but the circle-oak emulates spin
and reasserts all motion
in a world so sparse, so stopped.

Lee Slonimsky’s work has appeared in Best of Asheville Poetry Review, California Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly, Measure, Mudfish, The New York Times, New Ohio Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Poetry Daily, and has received seven Pushcart Prize nominations. A chapbook co-authored with poet Katherine Hastings, Slow Shadow/White Delirium, was published by Word Temple Press of Santa Rosa, California, this past September. Lee’s fifth collection of poems, Wandering Electron, will be published in 2014 by Spuyten Duyvil Press of New York City. He is the co-author, along with his wife, Hammett Prize-winning mystery writer Carol Goodman, of the Lee Carroll Black Swan Rising trilogy (Tor Books). The final installment, The Shape Stealer, appeared earlier this year. Lee manages an SRI (“socially responsible investing”) hedge fund, Ocean Partners LP, which takes a special interest in companies with hiring programs for the developmentally disabled.