cryptical envelopment
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Look Away, Look Away
New Orleans would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically” or he and other white civic leaders would not return. –Jimmy Reiss, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2005The Bricks laid carefully byCreole craftsmen demolished,replaced with mock historicalstick & Tyvek by Latino refugees. Less than halfas many homes built to makethe Federal Flood… Continue reading
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Sad Baritone Saturday
A sad baritone blowing big round. Jello-tremulous Os of the blues. That’s what started this ramble into a pleasant melancholia, a fizzy afternoon beer buzz of sadness not quite cheerless, simply there like a color in the air, a sky so blue and clear you can hear it, a faint hum beneath your feet, a… Continue reading
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Poets Worth Reading
Poets worth reading usually believe things the age they live in no longer does. Poets are always anachronistic, obsolete, unfashionable, and permanently contemporary. — Charles Simic Continue reading
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Homily
Do we need to shine black light to illuminate the blood? Look: it’s on your hands. Continue reading
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2025
On The Centennial of Benito Mussolini’s Assumption of Dictatorial Powers in 1925 let us string piano wire like holiday tinsel and hang memorial ornaments to resistance, dangle the masked fatigue green monsters by their ankles while singing the carol of the partisan, crack poppers heard round the world and wear paper tricorn hats of Lexington… Continue reading
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Reading the News at Breakfast
they break us like eggs to feed their insatiable hungerleaving us nothing—just their careless mess expecting us to clean up in quiet obedience it’s time to press theiruncalloused hands into the fire untiltheir grasping fingers sizzle like bacon Continue reading
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The Island of Doctor Jeffers
Reading the long, narrative poems in the stout Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers takes me back to a book I read long ago: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. So many of his characters are monstrous deformities, half human and half animal. Not that such people don’t exist-the news today is filled with them-but… Continue reading
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The Price of Humanity
I am increasingly comfortable with the karmic cost of my unbridled hate for MAGA. My father was not a bad man; certainly not an evil man. I wish for everyone MAGA from Trump on down, all of them, what my father wished for the Nazis in Belgium in 1944: in service to the ideals of… Continue reading
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Shin Féin
Shin Féin, literally We Ourselves or Ourselves Alone, was raised as a cry and slogan my friend Ashley Morris on his blog after Katrina/The Federal Flood. He was the man who first said Fuck You You Fucking Fucks. John Goodman’s character in the HBO show Treme was based in part on Ashley. It was clear… Continue reading
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Lady Cardinal
discrete gray brown camouflage touch of blush on the wings unafraid as I pass not skittish but side eye wary while their men screech & hollar in them devil red suits they bought at Urban Bird with those shoes! 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, 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 