Not the perfect pietà nod of her head
or the awful pumpkin masquerading
as her beloved son’s sweet face
in the hat-topped photo we all know.
It is an angry God’s judgment
captured in the face behind her,
a man who loved her and the child
murdered in Mississippi goddamn.
The stoicism that hoed the cotton
and raised Pharaoh’s pyramids
holding tight to the white man’s god
because he is a god of vengeance.
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, 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 
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