CNN UNIVERSE

by Don Kingfisher Campbell

Beirut car bomb kills 8
Charred buildings, smoke in air
Chaos in the streets
Photos: aftermath of the blast
Rover spots shiny objects on Mars
Meteor lights up sky in California
Taliban threaten reporters
Beheaded for refusing to be prostitute
Dad in disbelief over son's terror arrest
U.S. contractors drunk on tape
Four women shot at Florida hair salon
Parents: man mocked disabled kid
Will Cain: Room for GOP at colleges?
Court: Fort hood suspect can be shaved
Elephant crushes Australian zookeeper
Man dumped, wins $30.5M lottery
Two-time rape victim fights for justice
Justin Bieber's mom on raising the star
McJordan BBQ sauce sells for $10K
Youth coach hits ref in face
Coroner: Heroin killed son of NFL coach
Duck lives with arrow in head
Cheerleaders OK'd to cheer God


Don Kingfisher Campbell has recently been published in Crack The Spine,
Lummox, Poetic Diversity, The Sun Runner, Poetry Breakfast, Pink Litter and
the Inner Child Press’ Hot Summer Nights anthology.  He is currently working
on an MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

MARS

by Howie Good

The god of carnage has grown

a balding man’s stringy ponytail.

Red, he says, means danger.

He shrugs his cruelly thin shoulders.

A tractor stands abandoned

in a field of what looks from here

like black puddles of blood.

The future will burn a full 40 days.

We will walk beside our coffins.

Starvelings will stare out

from behind barbed wire.

Mothers will shriek. There will be

nice grass in the cemetery.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.

MARS

by Robert Wooten

This artist's rendering provided by NASA shows the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. NASA announced Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012, it plans to send another Curiosity-like rover to Mars in 2020. (AP Photo/NASA)

Mars would be the perfect place to begin
to look for water underneath the surface.
It is under something, under my skin.

After we get there, we may find it in
the rocks, when we arrive by outer space.
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.

If not in rocks, it may be frozen
under the soil or in a deeper place.
It is under something, under my skin,

that to find it we may go deeper, then,
going down farther at a faster pace.
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.

But will we become earth’s poorest citizens,
taxed by vast holdings in the Martian race?
It is under something, under my skin.

What next?  the chance of oceans deeply hidden,
drillings with the hope of finding a trace?
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.
It is under something, under my skin.


Robert Wooten's poems currently appear in Long Story Short, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Trajectory, Convergence, and  The Fifth D . . ..