America's funeral procession runs through New Orleans
to the sea: the residual dust of busted Missouri sod,
limbs and whole trees, the carcasses of errant livestock,
twinkly drink cans, forever bottles, empty chemical drums,
raw and sanitized sewage, pesticide and fertilizer,
the latter fueling algae blooms which suck all oxygen
from the Gulf waters, producing vast dead zones.
The reject and the runoff, the discarded and the dead
flow into the Gulf of Mexico, where the offshore oil rigs,
add tar balls and glistening slicks, to the bodies
of the suffocated fish, the unnatural rafts of jellyfish
which end on the bleached beaches of our grandiose
condo shores, into the stubs of our dissolving marshes,
laying a catastrophic strata to rival the great meteor’s
geologic record of that unavoidable extinction,
what will remain forever of our brief Anthropocene.
America’s funeral procession
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 
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