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A Limited Number of Miracles
This poem is inspired by Jonathan Penton’s excellent book A Limited Number of Miracles from Lavender Ink (2025), in which each poem is inspired by a piece in the Bestoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It’s not just that fhey took Hercules down in front and moved him to the sculpture Continue reading
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His Raptures
so many,I had not thought death had undone so many. — T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” Not death but that fine madness, though so many ended their own lives: John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz. I have lied about suicidal ideation to psych although that has mostly been a creative excersise. Have you ever thought: stop Continue reading
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Clown Face
Brain maniacally pedaling the veledromeof cyclothymia and I can’t stop writingabout the women keeping me up at nightbut only in my dreams and calculationsof the tells I think I see across the tableas my second adolescence wobblesonto the track obsessed with his Big Wheelroaring to run away with the circus with-out ending up in Blue Continue reading
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It’s not the coffee
I am Captain Cortisol, The Amazingly Electric Man I start my day with the Heebie Jeebees and coffee. Imagine the visible veins in your skin as wiring now run an unpleasant current through yourselfas if your whole body was an extension of your tongue and you’ve just put that nine volt battery on. It’s that Continue reading
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I Miss the Crisp Leaves
I miss the crisp leaves who’ve stolenJoseph’s coat, my now grown kidstoddling through an acre of pumpkinson the vine, wandering the corn mazein the dark, the scary hayride, hot chocolate after around the fire. I don’t miss Minnesota’s mosquitoeswith their alien proboscis ride alongsraised welts on my bayou-tested skin.Summer waited for the Fourth whileJune poured Continue reading
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There’s more, Leonard
“Poetry is just the evidence of life.If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”– Leonard Cohen I saw this Instagram post quote and thought: ash like the black strain on paper. but also the warmth of shared connection, the flicker of imagination’s possibilities, and the smoke rising up to the heavens. Continue reading
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Berryman’s Sonneta, con’t.
There are now 19 pages in the manuscript Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit. Lord help me. I’m struggling with whether to keep posting them here or getting a chapbook manuscript together. Double I sing, I must, your utraquist,Crumpling a syntax at a sudden need,Stridor of English softening to pleadO to you plainly lest you more 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 