New Orleans
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The Genie-Soul of the Place
The godsons of cotton who run the place regardless of elections try to erase what is incomfortably alien, the lazy anti-Anglo, our insistence that we work to live and do not live to work, ask each other not “what do you do” but “where did you go to (high) school.” They would likd to contain… Continue reading
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An Ode-ious History of New Orleans
I can’t think of anywhere I could try to publish this so I’m putting it up here. After the “Beautiful Times” and “The Capital”sections of Czeslas Milosz’s “A Treatise on Poetry”“I remember everything.”—”Natura”, MiloszThe calas woman calling over the muddy road,mounted by her tignon like the loa of womanhood. German bakers shape the baguettes, smell… Continue reading
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Fifth of July
Yesterday I posted here a poem titled Moloch which was basically me riffing on part two of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl out of my own and more contemporary experiences. Shortly after I took it down and replaced it with Quiet Fireworks. I then posted a video on the socials of a small upside down American flag… Continue reading
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Back to the Island
When the days are empty of work except for what I choose–reading and writing, some chores, the garden–I take long walks in the forest arboretum not to raise my heart rate but to lower it, to follow–after the admonition from yoga–the breath of everything. Lately my thoughts roam unleashed there, thinking of natural beauty in… Continue reading
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The Last Days of May
I was born in 1957 and so I am reckoned by some one of the last of the baby boomers, that generation borne by the parents who went through World War II. I grew up in a neighborhood full of fathers who had served in World War II, some later in Korea, and frankly I… Continue reading
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Return to Scout Island
Today was the first time I set foot on Scout Island in City Park since the 1960s. I had some unpleasant childhood experiences there: the Cub Scout den camp out when I burned myself on the Coleman lantern and my father and Uncle decided to treat it by pouring cold Dixie beer onto it, and… Continue reading
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Easter Hangover Monday
It’s Easter Hangover Monday, that peculiar New Orleans holiday when nothing is accomplished except perhaps some half-priced drug store chocolate consumed in the car. Bunny ears and flower crowns wilted on the television couch not watching the quiet green parade of a golftournament strictly for the green and trees and lagoon blue, that soft ambience… Continue reading
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East of the End of the World
An hour east of the End of the World sign somewhere just inside Delacroix a city is vanishing into America, dissolving wholesale in a Starbucks blender, as if buried in the contaminated sediment of The River; a Las Vegas scale, prime-time vanishing act in which a city is transformed into a waterfront Disney attraction, minus… Continue reading
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The Spirit of the Mask
Something I wrote 17 years ago for sadly departed friend Victoria Slind-Flor, formerly of New Orleans, for the guests of a Carnival Ball in miniature she was hosting in Oakland, CA, To the Honored Members and Guests of the Krewe of Baubo and Ame no Uzume: When one is called to Carnival, the first question… Continue reading
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A Limited Number of Miracles
This poem is inspired by Jonathan Penton’s excellent book A Limited Number of Miracles from Lavender Ink (2025), in which each poem is inspired by a piece in the Bestoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It’s not just that fhey took Hercules down in front and moved him to the sculpture… 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, 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 