New Orleans
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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
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City Park
The primordial captured in a park. The remnant bayou and old growth of live oak, cloaked in resurrection fern, crow home and owl haunt;crenellations of cypress knees stand guard against flood. Pines rise in defiance of the Gulf’s summer fury, limbs lost,trunks tilted but unbroken. This insistent forest, older thanthe centuries of city across the… Continue reading
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If on a winter’s night a crisp crackling hiss
Outside it was minus 41 farenheit, ambient, in the bright, white night. Inside it was 1910 Craftsman all original except the electric stove and water heater circuit, the rest cloth hung from glass posts. You could measure in hands how much horsehair was left in the frigid wall, between seven and ten. The windows were… Continue reading
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Just a heathen, I guess
When The Troth, the Heathen/Asatru organization I joined 10 years ago, published the schedule for the Winter Moot and I saw a blog to Bragi and Odin, I immediately signed up. If you’ve been here before you know I’m a writer and primarily a poet of late, and Bragi is the first among poets, bard to… Continue reading
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Hail Atlantis
All the news in and about New Orleans and I find myself drawn back to words I wrote 17 years ago. https://wetbankguide.blogspot.com/search?q=Atlantis+ Continue reading
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Smells Like Late Capitalism
Duck and coverHave anotherIt’s your favoritecherry flavor Have anotherthere’s no work hereone more day spentdrinking cheap beer. It’s your favoriteCome and take itsoda waterthat’s been snake bit Cherry flavorfactory savorturn the world offduck and cover Hello. How low. Hell no. Let’s go!What’s that? Black cat. Boss fat. Take that!Wrench in. No spin. No sin. We’ll… Continue reading
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Yuletide Miracles
Lifted from an old Wet Bank Guide post, during the Long Exile. But I believe in Christmas miracles. A decade ago, my three-year old daughter fell in love with a character called Rugby Tiger, from an obscure Muppet’s movie call the Christmas Toy. Having Rugby Tiger was her only Christmas wish, the secret she shared… Continue reading
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Old Black Joe
“I’m a comin’ I’m a comin ‘though my head is hanging low.” These lyrics were sung in some forgotten cartoon of my youth by a stereotypical bipedal hound dog. Only recently when they popped into my head a couple of times that I discover they were taken from the lyrics of “Old Black Joe” by… 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 