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At the Gentilly A&P
At the Gentilly A&P where old Black men came up to me and said, Where’s this? pointing at a list I knew they could not read and I would take them up and down the aisles until their cart was full. It was there I saw two men in well-slept, street-rough clothes with a handful… Continue reading
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The Crime of St. Boniface
I knew that place, those trees, well. I had given the shaded apse beneath the perfect arch of branches that shaded a soft place of leaf letter over cool earth a name: Oaken Hof, from the germanic word for a temple. I dropped a pin on Google Maps of that spot. When the bank broke… Continue reading
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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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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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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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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
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 