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Promiscuously Autobiographical
“I’m promiscuously autobiographical, but it’s never gotten me into trouble.” Samuel R. Delaney, interviewed by The New Yorker Continue reading
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Safe As Milk
Gay zoned, a particular space in the friend zone in which she says, I loved my gay friends. It was so safe there. You could be yourself. You could be sexy without worrying about someone trying to get into your pants. She said this after I confessed again it wasn’t her cheek or forehead I… Continue reading
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Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit
(16) Writing poetry is an unnatural act — Elizabeth BishopNothing kinky. Think cuddles: the collapseof two into one, of that one into comfort:the innocent–the long hug, the movie couch–and the afterwards, coming back from blisswhere union is fully consummated by touchskin to skin, hands measuring from shoulder to hip the full depth of desire, while… Continue reading
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Just a Dancing Bear
I was a dateless and frustrated kid, only getting a little lucky if we both were drunk, which started so damn young when I was a teenager as if at once to ease and to drown adolescence. I was spectrally bashful like a ghost around young women and spending adolescence in an all boy’s school… Continue reading
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The Sonnette
In an effort to curb my voluability, let’s consider a poem of two stances of four and three lines for a total of seven or have a sonnet, with a clear Volta. A Sonnette “I was cured, all right.”—Alex DeLarge in Kubick’s A Clockwork Orange It’s not enough to be possessed.You must enter the… Continue reading
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“To find my home . . .”
To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. —Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley–Paris–Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981–1983 Which brought Wallace Stevens “The Idea of… Continue reading
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Bukowski’s Bluebird
Not only words in his mouthbut what look like feathers,clamped tight in his teethlike an anxious gambler’s cigarette.Cat eyed and smiling at the bar,he caught beauty perched on a stooland swallowed it in one bite.Now odd notes issue from his throat.His words emerge as song.First appeared onThe Dead Mule Schoolof Southern Literature Continue reading
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The Genie-Soul of the Place
The godsons of cotton who run the place regardless of elections try to erase what is incomfortably alien, the lazy anti-Anglo, our insistence that we work to live and do not live to work, ask each other not “what do you do” but “where did you go to (high) school.” They would likd to contain… Continue reading
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Grinding Ink
My partner and first reader/editor thinks this is a little preachy if not in fact curmudgeonly ranty. Thoughts? Grinding Ink“To whom do we tell what happened on the earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up and will stay so?”—Czeslasz Milosv, “Annalena”I want to swallow… Continue reading
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Reading Myself to Death
Tie me to the chair first, honey. I’m a glutton for delicious torment. I’m reading all of Czeslaw Milosz which is not as emotionally fraught as reading through all of Louise Glück. I enjoy the change of tone, from feminine to masculine reflection, like one of those flip over bathroom mirrors. Much of Glück is… Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 