New Year, New Work
New Year, New Work
So excited to be able to share a poem by Stephani Maari Booker...Unfit to Print 2.0
Welcome to 2022! Today’s Unfit to Print features the poem “All matter great and small” by Stephani Maari Booker. I met Stephani “on paper” back in 1999 when a friend and I published the first issue of anteup, a journal of writing by Queer women and Queer women-identified writers. Stephani’s poem “Thief” appeared alongside work from 14 other writers in the first issue. Although the journal was short-lived (only two print issues in 1999, then two online in 2000), the work within it, and the design of it, beautifully captured a unique moment in the so-called “before times:” before everything analog went digital; before 9/11 changed the way our society functions; before many in the LGBT movement either forgot about the revolutionary ideas and poems of Queer women like Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, or traded them in for acceptance into the dominant culture. So many amazing writers were showcased in those issues of anteup, and every once-in-a-while, when I feel that urge to Google surf, I’m filled with joy to find all those writers still fighting the fight.
I see Stephani now mostly on LinkedIn—she, too, continues to do the work of writing, and I continue to be just as inspired by her words today as I was decades ago.
From the poet:
After winning a copy of “The Best American Poetry 2017,” edited by Natasha Trethewey, in a Goodreads.com giveaway, I started submitting poetry to journals that originally published the works selected for the book. These being popular, highly selective, acclaimed journals that often pay poets for their work, I piled up a lot of rejections. This particular poem, “All matter great and small,” is among the works I submitted. Not only has it been rejected about 16 times, but also many journals won’t even accept it for submission due to its length of 79 lines.
The poem mixes up my musing about life, the universe and everything (apologies to Douglas Adams) with references to a science fiction movie classic and a hymn used for titles to a famous book series by a veterinarian.
All matter great and small
All matter great and small
All energy bright and dark
All life common or rare
The big bang made it all?
Is this the new hymn
we should sing
to the universe?
Does the cosmos
require the worship
from one speck of
dust in the dark?
We dance on a quilt pin
around a glowing
golden basketball
that becomes a BB shot
next to a blue giant
bowling ball,
then less than a spore
before the might of
a red giant beach ball.
We kill microbes,
smash atoms,
when the sun sees us
as only bigger
than the atoms,
those little reverse
solar systems
that make us—
sub-nano suns
spinning around
sub-nano planets.
And to the brilliant
blue and red spheres
beyond the circle
where we spin,
what are we?
The Incredible Shrinking Man,
reducing into new microcosms,
living in the stellar system of a
dihydrogen monoxide molecule
as we wade in multitudes of
those same molecules
that make up a wet drop
sprinkled with soil
covering our proton
circling our electron
all by ourselves
thinking we’re alone.
The lonely nano-man
knows he’s not alone.
He knows that there are
bigger particles
bigger suns
bigger systems
bigger organisms
beyond his sight
beyond his reach
but forever in
the expanses
of his memory.
He believes
because he has seen.
Our sight tells us
we live on a table
with a light bulb
shining over it.
Our sky machines
send us electronic visions
of a big blue marble
when we don’t
even amount to a
sub-atomic particle
to the largest stars
we know.
The limitless greatness,
our infinite smallness—
will we ever see it
and believe?
—SMB