Several months under black contractor plastic to blank the slate upon which to draw a garden which instead draws the persistent Virginia creeper from next door, spreading its subterranean tendrils under the new laid mulch, taunting the gardener into contemplating the Round Up for poison ivy because you can’t buy Agent Orange at Lowe’s and this is war: insidious infiltration of my perimeter just coming up alyssum from seed, and from which I zipper rip the landlord’s St. Aug a satisfying yard at a time whenever it pokes a stolon into the garden bed. This Parthenocissus (Greek for maiden or virgin) quinquefolia is no lady, with the aggressive manners of a prostitute at the bottom of the gang plank crowded with paid off sailors. My first attempt to ID it with a plant app suggested Devil’s Beggarticks and I like that name better. This stuff laps up the industrial strength vinegar like it’s sucking on stuffed artichoke leaves. When I pull it I can sometimes see the rhizomes running off but following them all would require me to tear up the entire bed and probably the landlord’s lawn. Now there’s an ideaI think as I rip up another yard of St. Aug.
Devil’s Beggartick
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, 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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