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Ghosts of the Flood
Originally published on Wetbankguide.blogspot.com om October 2005 ” . . . so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many . . . “The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot Sometimes I feel them, my wife told me, their spirits, as I’m driving down the street. All that suffering, she explains, all those people. As Continue reading
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We Live in Smoke
we live in smoke not as the ancestors did old stories around the fire passing a pipe, the dark flavor of roasted meat we suck the unburnt carbon of our world as if we each just lit a cigarette Continue reading
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Lines on His 68th Birthday
(much) after Everette Maddox Atop the spoil pile left over from digging the lagoons whichslowly slides and subsidesback to the natural flatof this river bottom city In June’s mock-August swoon, after a difficult ascent withan old man’s AWOL big toesand the huff and puffof 50 years of cigarettes So many battles of my youthfought nearby, Continue reading
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The Crime of St. Boniface
I knew that place, those trees, well. I had given the shaded apse beneath the perfect arch of branches that shaded a soft place of leaf letter over cool earth a name: Oaken Hof, from the germanic word for a temple. I dropped a pin on Google Maps of that spot. When the bank broke Continue reading
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Not a Black Madonna
Not the perfect pietà nod of her heador the awful pumpkin masqueradingas her beloved son’s sweet facein the hat-topped photo we all know. It is an angry God’s judgmentcaptured in the face behind her,a man who loved her and the childmurdered in Mississippi goddamn. The stoicism that hoed the cottonand raised Pharaoh’s pyramidsholding tight to Continue reading
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Churn and Taxis
The back of a Toyota Uber pales against the Rocket V-8 Cab Rasta madman who took our drunken asses back to Carrollton when the green streetcar failed to appear on Canal. His rattletrap blue GM something rang like a Jamaican sleigh over the potholes, & when his glove box popped open, spilling fat spliffs into Continue reading
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The Slow Noon Burn of June 16
Originally posted on June 20, 2009 on my Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans blog Canal Street in the slow noon burn of June. Thin dribbles of tourists pass up and down, hug the narrow ledge of shade along the buildings as if some abyss yawned at the curb. A handful of hotel Continue reading
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Just another manic Monday
Sunday Neurosis: Victor Frankl is thought to have coined the term Sunday Neurosis referring to a form of depression resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over. Psychology Wiki. Saturday’s are my least favorite day of the week. Allowed to just sit and drink Continue reading
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There is a bitter root
Somewhere in this house is (should be) a hardback first edition (foxed) City Lights pocketbook of the selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca. I carried it to Spain and laid it on his desk in his home in town. My tour had to wait for the private visit of a famous bullfighter. And I had 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 