An asterisk is the smallest star most of us will ever draw, and Dave Bonta's ten-line poem treats it that way: a star shrunk to a typed character, sending signals from the bottom of the page. It looks like a riddle about punctuation, but it is really about scale. Size and distance keep trading places, and one tiny mark can bend a whole book out of shape.
The opening couplet sets the rule: "To be small is to be distant / & vice versa." Anyone who has looked at the night sky knows the first half, since faraway things shrink. The surprise is "vice versa," which asks us to believe smallness also creates distance. For an asterisk that is easy to accept. It is so tiny that the eye skims past it, and when it does catch us it sends us away to a note at the foot of the page. The ampersand matters too. It is a typographer's shorthand, a small mark in its own right, and it gives the line a casual, scribbled-in-the-margin feel. The poem also begins its second line and its last couplet with "&," so it is stitched together by the kind of symbol it is talking about.
Then the poem swerves from sight to sound. "The asterisk calls. / It leaves a message." The most natural reading is the star key on a telephone, which turns the asterisk into a caller who has reached voicemail. "Calls" may also hint at how a footnote marker summons the reader down the page. But when "you turn it all the way up," the message turns out to be almost nothing: "it sounds like a small fan." That anticlimax is both the joke and the point. The second-person "you" pulls the reader in, and we lean toward the speaker expecting a voice. What we get is an impersonal whirr, like white noise. "Small" returns from line one, now attached to a household appliance, so the cosmic and the domestic collide. The radiating spokes of an asterisk could also suggest fan blades, though the poem leaves us to make that link ourselves.
The fourth couplet imagines "some parallel universe" where "all the stars look like this." Here "this" is a curious pointer. In the text as given, the asterisk never actually appears. Only its name does, in the title and the opening of the second couplet. So "this" points at a mark we have to picture, and the poem becomes a footnote marker with no footnote. It calls, it promises more, and what arrives is hum. Whether or not that was planned, it fits the poem's mood of distance, where a message is sent but never quite received.
The final couplet runs across the stanza break: "& books with too many footnotes / collapse into black holes." After a run of short, end-stopped statements, the poem finally opens into one longer sentence, and then the sentence itself collapses. The sounds help. The hard *k* of "collapse" and "black" gives way to the open vowel of "holes," so the line seems to fall inward. The logic is neat, because stars are what collapse into black holes, and if the asterisk is a star, enough footnotes will pile up mass until gravity wins. It is a gentle joke at the expense of scholarly excess. It also loops back to the opening, since a black hole is the extreme case of being small and distant, an object from which no message escapes. The little fan-noise from the asterisk looks almost friendly beside it.
Structurally the poem is plain. It is five unrhymed couplets in conversational speech, with no ornament and no strict meter. The short sentences read like deadpan statements, and each couplet becomes a small box holding one idea, much as a footnote does. That restraint is part of the humor, because the poem keeps a straight face while moving from phone keys to parallel universes.
The poem is significant because it practices what it describes. It is short and typographically modest, yet it travels from a single printed mark to telephones, household fans, other universes and collapsing stars. It suggests that small things are not necessarily minor, and that careful attention to a speck on the page can open a very large space.