Toni Burns – Stars, Self-Worth, and the Space We All Deserve to Shine In
In There Might Be Others (and still, I’m here), Toni Burns traces a quietly luminous line between the cosmic and the personal. The spark arrives in an unlikely moment: a priest at Liverpool Cathedral wondering aloud about life beyond Earth, and whether the presence of “others”—whoever they may be—would diminish the goodness of God. His answer is a gentle, resonant no. Every life, he suggests, carries its own worth. No universe can overcrowd that truth.
Burns takes that idea and folds it inward, mapping it onto the intimate terrain of imposter syndrome. Beginning a new job, faced with fresh faces and learned voices, it is easy—too easy—to slip into the belief that someone else’s brilliance somehow subtracts from your own. She captures that quiet panic, that creeping suspicion that you’re the dimmest star in a constellation of brighter ones. But the poem doesn’t linger in shadow. Instead, it performs a careful, hopeful pivot: coexistence instead of comparison, abundance instead of scarcity. The stars keep shining, every one of them; none of them steals light from the next.
This blend of reflective questioning and gentle affirmation has become a hallmark of Burns’ work. After years of keeping her ideas tucked away, she now treats creativity as an open-ended adventure—one documented through her Substack, @curi0sitycabinet, where she writes with equal parts wonder and precision. As co-curator of Flesh & Parchment, the Liverpool zine exploring the uncanny and beautifully strange, she leans into the places where ideas blur and boundaries loosen.
In There Might Be Others, Burns extends an earnest invitation: to imagine a universe—inner and outer—where worth is not rationed but shared, and where simply being here is reason enough to shine.
There Might Be Others (and still, I’m here)
They were talking about life
on other planets
and the whole time
I was sitting there thinking
about how the universe
is so much bigger than I let it be—
how I try to keep it
small enough to manage,
like a to-do list
or a room with the door closed.
But if there are others,
millions, billions,
whole populations of beings
somewhere past the veil
of what we can prove—
then what does that make me?
What does that make us?
Not less, apparently.
And somehow that wandered
into the dark corners of my own mind,
where the old voice lives—
the one that tells me
everyone else knows what they’re doing
and I am a fluke,
a smudge
on the otherwise neat page.
Because haven’t I always believed
that if everyone else is good,
then that must mean I am not?
As if grace were a pie
and I arrived late
and the slices are gone—
and someone is too polite to tell me
I shouldn’t even be holding a plate.
But no one said that.
Not really.
Not in words.
And if galaxies can bloom
and stretch
and spin their bright arms wide
without stepping on each other’s toes,
then maybe
I can be here—
awkward, unsure,
but here—
without taking anything away
from anyone else.
It is not either-or.
It is not them or me.
It is not perfection or nothing.
Maybe the stars are not
a ladder.
Maybe they are just stars.
And maybe I am
not failing
just because someone else
is singing louder.
Maybe I am still
worth listening to,
even if my voice trembles.
TONI BURNS
