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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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Going Quiet in the Forest
For a forest friend Going quiet in the forest is exhilarant living.Leave your sugar frosted lattespeaker phone in airplane mode.Choose wild cherries and passion flowers.There are thrills in trills in the trees,the slow dance of coasting birds,frog song conga lines at dusk.Go quietly and with someonewho stoops to toad stools; stops, looksand listens with hawk-sharp… Continue reading
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Another Anecdote of a Jar
You were never meant to hold that much without breaking, the ad for some tincture promising happiness said. Don’t buy it.There are flowers and leaves and mushroomsenough in the forest. The only bottle you needis one for cool water so you can remain quietly with the unmolested medicine still rooted in the earth, both you… Continue reading
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Reading Poetry to the Anhinga
I’ve done something to my achilles, possibly pushing way too hard into barefoot shoes, although at 69 it could be any number of things. I have, for example, somehow developed duck-footedness and often sit with my feet balanced on their ball, an anxiety thing that probably doesn’t do my achilles any good either. I was… Continue reading
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Beautiful Things That Come Late in Life
I’m reading straight through Louise Glück, wondering how I missed her decades ago, why she didn’t leap out at me from some anthology, before I settled into reading the same dozen books over and over for the middle-class, mortgage part of my life, too busy with the kids. There are a raft of poems in… Continue reading
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El Nopal (39)
A better fortune teller confided once it meant: no one comes to see the prickly pear until it blossoms… Continue reading
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Venice’s Relentless Tides
Fuck whoever is behind the crossbar.This is not about who was crucified and why. This is introduction to Western Civilization. Read the syllabus, do the work or you’ll nevermake it out of the auditoriums.This is not a safe space. This is the world you aspire to inherit in all its glorious horrorsa British Museum of… Continue reading
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Polaroid
A post prompted by the editor’s note to the November 2025 Poetry I had left unopened. Poetry resembles photography from the age of the film camera. There was no phone in your hand. You had to fetch the thing, load it with film carefully and advance it to the ready, wait for the flash to… Continue reading
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Bury me in that warm country
And it was at that age … Poetry arrivedin search of me. — Pablo Neruda A poem from almost 25 years ago, back when I started writing poetry again having given it up in my youth. This was written while I still lived in Fargo we’re fleeting summer was a pleasure. Lilacs at the lastLilacs… 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 