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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
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That Bright Moment
YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT MOMENTWHERE YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM— Samuel R. Delaney in City of a Thousand Suns In Delaney’s novella trilogy Fall of the Towers the characters must confront the mass, simultaneous discovery by an entire society that a key assumption about their lives–that there was an enemy beyond the barrier; that… Continue reading
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We return like the tides
What will happen when the next big one overtops the levees of new orleans, asks Dr, Jeff Masters former director of the National Hurricane Center in this article. What happens to New Orleans’ levees when a Category 4 hurricane hits? My answer on the link post he shared on Blue Sky: We return, like the… Continue reading
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Crow Law
Sitting as an old man sometimes must as if waiting for a bus, I picked up a book I keep handy, 250 Poems A Portable Anthology, which I let fall open to pick me a poem and found a new favorite Crow poem. CROW LAW Linda Hogan p. 1993*========================The temple where crow worshipswalks forward in… Continue reading
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Ghosts of the Flood
Originally published on Wetbankguide.blogspot.com om October 2005 ” . . . so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many . . . “The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot Sometimes I feel them, my wife told me, their spirits, as I’m driving down the street. All that suffering, she explains, all those people. As… Continue reading
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Warriors in Words for New Orleans
I see that Loyola University is having a Katrina/Federal Flood Memorial conference with two panels of literary writers titled Writers on the Storm, composed only of established literary writers. Ignored are the citizen journalists and powerful diarists of the event who came to call themselves the NOLA Bloggers. These people, not writers by trade, poured… 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 