New Orleans
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Equilibrium
After years of chemically-modulated equilibrium it’s strange to wander once again the chase light calliope streets and the beckoning, threatening alleys my mind maps onto the world. Yesterday was work and errands and writing and a fine poetry reading. Today is a tree under which I will sit and contemplate the war of the oaks Continue reading
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Three Years August
Three years August and the storms are being named like epic ships, a doom upon our shore, and I think of the levees still leaking and of the flood-walls patched with paper mache, our Potemkin defenses are not ready and we are not ready and the Big One is out there, invisible, a mighty wind, Continue reading
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Is it speaking?
Excellent poetic advice from Julia Bloch from today’s Poem-A-Day “Valley Oak.” I laid the stems of letters across wet pages. Does itsit right at the hip? Is itin key? Is itmimetic? Is it lacy or sparking?Is it speaking? Continue reading
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Fire and Smoke
The habit Fargo winters could not kill,the wind swept chain link cage where in we wentto smoke, our coal end glowing in the snow,finds my half corona well intent to sit in searing heat suggesting itsthe end of things which others talk about,the dinosaurs’ revenge against the skythat left them liquifacted under stone. My watch Continue reading
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Truck Stop Girl
This is the song I must learn pitch perfect in case I never called upon to sing an American song in a small Irish pub. Your Humble Narrator Tailights flickerin’ as he pulled up to a truck stopThe same old crowd was hangin’ out again tonightHe said, “Fill up my tank while I go check Continue reading
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Bohemian Dreams
The online French Quarter Journal published a story On the Origin of Jackson Square Artists: “They were a rowdy bunch” and I immediately thought of my father, Sidney J. Folse, Jr. A senior architect at the prominent local firm of Curtis & Davis, from the age before computer driven design when architects had to draw Continue reading
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Siriusly
Venus is sinking. The moon is fleeing. The air is a breathless bath-water smothering. The rain is elsewhere. The clouds have flown. The dogs are all weary. The crickets are silent. The sun is waiting, just over the horizon, ready for another chorus of those Summertime Blues. 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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The Old New Orleans
I was locked out of Lakeview NextDoor for three days after I called out a woman who said the poor services at the West End Walgreens was likely due to “corporate DEI” goals or quotas, I forget which and can’t see her post again for three days. My first comment was, “wow, did you really 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 