poetry
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The Sunsetting
The Sunsetting “Good night, and good luck” — Edward R. Murrow.Burning red and orangeare the colors of sunsetand the President issunsetting on television.Welcome to the twilightof the United States.Our monuments are giltin Krylon metallic goldand the Capitol has become an unbarred madhouse.Visit the New and ImprovedSmithsonian museumsfull of Beautifulest American Truth in the fashion of… Continue reading
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Shatter Complacency
“Poetry should be written so that if you throw a poem at the window, the glass will shatter.” – Daniil Kharms, 1930 Continue reading
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Look Away, Look Away
New Orleans would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically” or he and other white civic leaders would not return. –Jimmy Reiss, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2005The Bricks laid carefully byCreole craftsmen demolished,replaced with mock historicalstick & Tyvek by Latino refugees. Less than halfas many homes built to makethe Federal Flood… Continue reading
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Homily
Do we need to shine black light to illuminate the blood? Look: it’s on your hands. Continue reading
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Reading the News at Breakfast
they break us like eggs to feed their insatiable hungerleaving us nothing—just their careless mess expecting us to clean up in quiet obedience it’s time to press theiruncalloused hands into the fire untiltheir grasping fingers sizzle like bacon Continue reading
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The Island of Doctor Jeffers
Reading the long, narrative poems in the stout Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers takes me back to a book I read long ago: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. So many of his characters are monstrous deformities, half human and half animal. Not that such people don’t exist-the news today is filled with them-but… Continue reading
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Lady Cardinal
discrete gray brown camouflage touch of blush on the wings unafraid as I pass not skittish but side eye wary while their men screech & hollar in them devil red suits they bought at Urban Bird with those shoes! Continue reading
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Next Weekend at Marienbad
Let’s go! Outof here intoa b&winnocencea distantpalatial set piecethe classyevening clothesthe driftof mysterydropping our ragsworried into holes and be strangersmeant for each otheragain. Continue reading
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Out of this World
I did not read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child–which is kind of surprising in retrospect– unless I read it at a moment when I really need toescape from the world and have blacked out why and the books. Based on this quote I just ordered The Magician’s Nephew. I think it’s a good… 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 