New Orleans
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Struck numb
Struck numbin the new yearby fresh horrors.The old yearscythes throughthe new, bodiesscattered likefirework wrappers.A year bornin blood and terrorwith politicianscrawling overthe mangled carcassfor the cameras. Monster truckzero to 60in four secondssilent electricengine twistscelebrationinnocentssheet metalinto horror.Does it matterwhich flagor religionthis broken mandeclared his banner? Each newhorror inspiresa lone Hero(he thinks)ready trainedto kill the Othermore horrificallyto honor Continue reading
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Washed Away
Jimmy Reiss, a prominent local businessman and then-head of the (New Orleans) Business Council, told the Wall Street Journal that the city would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically”, or he and other white civic leaders would not return. The Bricks laid carefully byCreole craftsmen demolished,replaced with mock historicalstick and Continue reading
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Becoming
“I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.”– Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Continue reading
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The Chase Light Calliope Fun House of Madness
The medication for REM sleep disorder, what leads me to occasionally smack Patrice with my left arm as I reach out to catch a baseball or assume yoga positions while asleep, foregrounds my amazing Technicolor dreamscape which I jokingly refer to as the Chase Light Calliope Fun House of Madness. It is overriding another medication Continue reading
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Apocalypse No. 1
The government radio somewhere behind me warbles its emergency signal like tortured locusts, announcing blood rain. I have coffee and whiskey and cigarettes enough, water and canned rations aplenty. Here on the dissolving horizon of the continent, abandoned by progress, we understand how to do apocalypse properly. I ignore the robotic voice which will outlast Continue reading
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Carry a Lantern
If poetry does not carry a lantern from house to house,if the poor do not know what it ‘means’we had better discard it!It is better that we seek immortal silence. —Mahmoud Darwish▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎ (Trans. by John Mikhail Asfour) Continue reading
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[ALL THOSE SHIPS THAT NEVER LANDED]
After Bob Kaufman‘s All Those Ships That Never Sailed All those ships that never landed in the Port of Gaza, their cargoes of bread and of medicine for the hospitals reduced to rubble, are now stranded in other ports, empty, bleeding rust. Trapped in a racist nightmare land with no hope of escape by sea Continue reading
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The Last Temptation of Mark
I finished my Mardi Gras Day with a Buffa Burger, and stepped outside to order a car and vape while I waited. It was a busy day and my wait 25+ minutes, so I stood on the corner and considered the crowd around me. There was a young woman sitting alone at an outside table, 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 