“I can feel summer sinking into the earth,” my mother said one evening.
— Anne Carson, “Thirst: Introduction to Kinds of Water”
Choosing between reading Anne Carson and Fernando Pessoa, my two current books, is like choosing between the pills and the handgun. Each has its merits, its attractions; both call you deeper into the dark.
This is not a suicide note. I’ve been practicing morbid rumination probably longer than you’ve been alive. I take up the darkness like some familiar artifact–say, the memory of a childhood bicycle–turning it in my hands and examining it from every angle, before I put it down and move on to something else.
Morbid Habits
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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