poetry
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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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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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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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On the beach
The Sun surveys hiscoming kingdom of scorched sandand motionless scrub. Where will the heronnest when the barren shallowsflash only with shell? Will the snakes returnto the sea when nothing elsestirs in the blank dunes? A bleached forest of pilingslike the salted trees in thebareness behind. The oil platforms offthis pleasant beach like standingstones left by… Continue reading
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Beach Proem After Olson
Black welk fragments and tiny shiny bits just where the surf defines the tideline, I choose a spit of sand where the beach turns and set out. There are no sea birds here among the beach people but past the tented encampments terns glide and stride on the wet sand as I do. One walks… Continue reading
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Vita Brevis
I hear the singing of the undertowwhere the anxious waves come and go. I watch it greedily leachaway the hot, inconstant sand from underneathFellini’s beached monster. Across the flooded beachthe café girl, angelic. I cannot reachher distant innocence from here. I turn my back on the fantasticand light another cigarette. Continue reading
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Interrupted by Hummingbirds
Compose your life like a prose poem suddenly interrupted by hummingbirds mistaking a woman’s perfume for wildflowers in Arles. A fast and bulbous moon the only excuse necessary for hallucinatory episodes at the Starbucks counter, visualizing Cthulhu in the foam and blocking the concoction of monstrous coffee drinks. When confronted with a Don’t Walk sign,… 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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Found Poem
Another drop of poison and I’ll dream of foreign lands …where … here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather. 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 