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Night Train to Lorca
There are moments I record here and moments I do not. Moments of terror or desire or shallow despair at the worthlessness of this endeavor. Why must I write? Because not to is to be a tourist.— Bill Lavender, “Tui” I got lost after leaving the Alhambra and stopped for lunch. On the way I… Continue reading
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Another Boston Massacre
All they wanted was a free education and the respect their fathers hadfor serving. They remembered pictures of the Guard rescuing frightened people from a flood. Like most people they did not follow the news except for scores, but saw the terrorizing crime stories out of the city which editors always pushed for clicks. They… Continue reading
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Not Drunk Unless
Not drunk unless on leafbreath and godswink, my path doesn’t stagger; it wanders with care, following some loose rules about how I pass by, under the boughs of and around certain trees, usually widdershins, compassing the roots and boles and others bowing for a benediction where the arch of branches buttress the sky. The Crow… Continue reading
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No to inhumanism and post-humanism
Answer to Robison JeffersTo keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams willnot be fulfilled. – “The Answer” Robinson Jeffers A delineated and revised poem. Yes and yes and yes and yes but no, not duped… Continue reading
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A Turing Test
Interrogator: Is there a window in the room where you are? A: No. B: No. Interrogator: Is it raining outside? A: Yes. B: I think so. Interrogator: Can you hear the rain on the roof? A: No. B: Yes, now that you mentioned it. Continue reading
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The Conga Beat of Wings
I was getting the side eye from birders in the Couterie Forest Arboretum yesterday for my drumming playinv on a small speaker on the strap of my water bottle. Little do they know I startled a hawk the other day turning a bend, long after they would have heard the drumming. Everything in that wood… Continue reading
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Spin the (pharmacy) bottle
The medication for REM sleep disorder, what leads me to occasionally smack Patrice with my left arm as I reach out to catch a baseball or assume yoga positions while asleep, foregrounds my amazing Technicolor dreamscape which I jokingly refer to as the Chase Light Calliope Fun House of Madness. It is overriding another medication… Continue reading
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They Themselves Have No Papers
They do not come in the nightlike the frights of childhood.In broad daylight, in masks in unmarked trucks and SUVs;without insignia, without badgeswithout the necessary legal papers–they themselves have no papers–to seize people off the streetfor being brown while employed,for speaking Spanish in public.It’s as if they launched a pogromagainst the European honey beefor daring… Continue reading
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The catalogs and the particular
One problem with leaving school is that I have no one to ask if the meticulous catalog of Marianne Moore’s poem “People’s Surroundings” (and many others, but this poem in particular prompted this thought) influenced Gertrude Stein’s odd inventory of the particular, so as to break intricate verse into a new geometry of the modern… Continue reading
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Another Police Riot
This poem was published in Unlikely Stories Version Six, and is this sort of writing I spoke about in the last post. Another Police Riot“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of… 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 