LIFE ON MARS

by John Whitney Steele

NASA’s Retiring Top Scientist Says We Can Terraform Mars and Maybe Venus, Too —The New York Times, January 2, 2022

Imagine the red planet with an atmosphere,

replete with plants and animals. It isn’t hard to do. 

A couple billion years ago Mars lost its air,

its water too, and so it is no longer blue.

But should we choose to live there, we could change it,

claims NASA’s top scientist. All we’d have to do

is terraform the planet—that goes for Venus too.

Put up a magnetic shield, block the sun, retain

more heat, and watch Mars turn from red to blue.

The solar system’s ours. Imagine life on Mars 

while back on planet Earth we churn out CO2.

John Whitney Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University. His chapbook The Stones Keep Watch was published by Kelsay Books in 2021. His full length collection Shiva’s Dance will be released in 2022. Born in Toronto and raised among the pines and granite cliffs of Foot’s Bay, Ontario, John lives in Boulder, Colorado where he encounters his muse wandering in the mountains.

A BILLION TONS

by Pepper Trail

A highway leading to downtown Los Angeles, California, is empty last month during the coronavirus pandemic. The view of downtown is clearer than usual as the city and the world sharply cut daily carbon dioxide emissions. But a new scientific study says the long-term effects of months-long reduction will be quite small. —AP, May 19, 2020 Photo:Mark J. Terrill/AP

Outside the window, a billion tons of CO2 are not there
I take the billion tons, wrap my arms around them
Muscle them down, get them into a shape I can handle
Fold them, fold them again, and smaller again,
Press them at last into what else but a diamond
Put it in a box for my daughter, for her wedding
If I would have a daughter, if she would have a wedding

Outside the window, 375,000 people are not there
One sang “Angel from Montgomery”—you can hear the echo
One thought the disease was a joke, until it wasn’t
One gave me the key to all the plants, and I have it still
They are beating against my window softly as moths
Against all the windows, and we look through them
When we look out, which is what we are always doing

Outside the window, my father and mother are not there
They left in good time, and were spared this particular nothing
My father is free to walk the Carolina forest, forever looking
Quietly content with bird or frog, bloodroot or lady-slipper
My mother can sing in her choir, too short to be seen
Behind the ranks of Easter lilies and the tall candles
But I know she is there, and I know where he has gone

Outside the window, my life is not there
The flight to Australia, the places never to be seen
The meal in the restaurant where we would have quarreled
Or where I would have said you were right, all along
The baseball games, your art show, the old too and fro
They say if you add it all up, it makes a billion tons
And also that, in the end, it makes no difference at all


Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

A MESSAGE FROM THE SECOND PLANET

by Martin Elster

A composite image of the planet Venus as seen by the Japanese probe Akatsuki. The clouds of Venus could have environmental conditions conducive to microbial life. IMAGE FROM THE AKATSUKI ORBITER, BUILT BY INSTITUTE OF SPACE AND ASTRONAUTICAL SCIENCE/JAPAN AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AGENCY via University of Wisconsin-Madison News, March 30, 2018.

On Friday, astronomers announced a new paper laying out the case for the atmosphere of Venus as a possible niche for extraterrestrial microbial life.—EarthSky, March 31, 2018


We’re microbes in the clouds of Venus
of an otherworldly genus
gobbling CO2 and spitting
out sulfuric acid—fitting
for a life form that can waft
akin to an ocean-going craft
far above the rocks and soil
whose heat will make lead bullets boil.

We’re vitamin D3 gourmets,
drinking ultraviolet rays
as we have done for donkey’s years,
wild about the atmosphere’s
asphyxiating greenhouse gas,
so reflective that your glass
sees only jewel-like radiance.
You scientists are on the fence

on whether there is life on Venus,
but only cause you haven’t seen us
yet. And we don’t want you to,
for if you poke and probe, you’ll strew
our virgin world with noxious matter.
All tranquility will shatter.
Goggle at our planet. Stand
in distant awe. But please don’t land!

Martin Elster is a composer and serves as percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poetry has appeared in Astropoetica, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Chimaera, and The Road Not Taken, among others, and in anthologies such as Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 and 2015 Rhysling Anthologies, New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, and Poems for a Liminal Age.

PREDICTION

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Coral reef scientists estimate that mass bleaching has killed 35% of corals on the northern and central Great Barrier Reef. After months of intensive aerial and underwater surveys, researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies have released an initial estimate of the death toll from coral bleaching. The impact, which is still unfolding, changes dramatically from north to south along the 2300km length of the Reef. “We found on average, that 35% of the corals are now dead or dying on 84 reefs that we surveyed along the northern and central sections of the Great Barrier Reef, between Townsville and Papua New Guinea,” says Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (JCU). “Some reefs are in much better shape, especially from Cairns southwards, where the average mortality is estimated at only 5%. —ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, May 30, 2016

A child, I dreamed of a metropolis of no kind I knew.
I can figure it out later, I said. Then came the boutique shoes.
What did I understand about those except to say no?
Over the tulle, I turned up my nose.

I spoke from the temple of childhood, from the fever-dream of growing up,
predicted no water to drink, more lost land, moaned, it will all
be gone soon—Saks Fifth, the city pool, the Port O’ Call, ousted
like Clyde Beatty's circus and its lions--to make room for other recreations.

In my first home, they taught fashion which is disguised prejudice
and manners which are mostly separation and meanness.
But what is my recollection? I was all mouth and adolescence.
I had yet to learn only compassion with gravy on its chin will sustain us.

And could I have dreamed an ocean stilled by its freight of CO2,
its islands of plastic? No. I could never imagine saltwater
stretched over  uncountable suffocated lives could not
foretell the piled and boundless bones of coral ravaged by a yacht.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and write in the Ozarks. She is the author of two books and three chapbooks, most recently Persephone on the Metro. See her work in Concis, Rat’s Ass Review, Mom Egg Review and upcoming in the Kentucky Review.