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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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The End of the Beach
At first I complained about the oil rigs and the hour round trip for anything in town. Being at the ass end of Fort Morgan near the ferry does have one good thing going for it: the chance for a solitary walk beyond all the beach people to where the only thing on two legs… 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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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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The ragged hem of Ocean
February 26. Covered 172 miles. Cloudy sky, grey sea. Nothingness. February 27, Covered 94 miles. Blue sky, blue sea. Nothingness. — Two log entries from Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way. This is not the ocean, these mild ripples washing the crowded shore. It is merely the edge of the thing, a ragged hem. The loud,… 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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Marooned in a crowd
This is more of an obligation than a vacation. Brought to near the end of the road Fort Morgan Alabama, where the sea view features two oil platforms, to join in the celebration of my sister’s 50th wedding anniversary. No room for us in the giant beach house they rented, they treated us to a… Continue reading
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Suttree
I was mumbling last month about starting up a Bloomsday reading again a few weeks ago but dropped it. And I haven’t cracked my much sticky noted and underlined disintegrating binding copy this year. Instead I am currently readinf Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, and I’m feeling disposed to call it the American Ulysses. It’s as… 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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Calf foot blues
Stock bones boiling in this pot black, hissing gas ring hot night, a slow reduction to the elemental in the fan-stirred simmerof this gelatin evening. 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 