limerence
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Otherly Love
Love. Lust. Limerance. Not adolescent or transient infatuation. The word I want is hiding from me. The ancient Greeks had a long list. Not Agape, the word for familial affection or loving kindness appropriated by the Greco-Romanized Christians; Philia is closer, that strong attraction of mind and heart as among best friends, which Plato thought… Continue reading
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Everette* Would’ve
If you catch yourself Googling Picasso’s young lover (Françoise Gilot) just because some lush young woman enthused about some pretty-good, give-away poem posted online for #napowrimo put down the tablet and go write in your notebook in some no-bars bar where nobody knows your name beneath a television baseball game you pathetic old coot of a… Continue reading
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His Toy, His Dream, His Rest
You’re upsetting Henry, said Mr. Bones, but in a good way. No it is not from the longer book from which I stole the title. The post title just fits the stolen stanzas. My lady partner (not my wife) is not “a complete nothing” although the image of another woman entering the scene, which I… Continue reading
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Mind Candy
Attraction flits past the eye but lands at and enters by the ear. It begins in the mind and is heard and felt by the ethereal sense, not seen. Are they intelligent and well-read and thoughtful and, most importantly, are they creative? It starts with the incorporeal exquisite heart. Is it gilded in a golden… Continue reading
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The Green Fellow

Walking is meditation if it enters into sudden birdsong and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not transcendence. I don’t want to escape this world. I don’t want the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it. I want to enter into this world as a duck enters water, as a towering tree enters the earth,… Continue reading
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Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit
(23) If you don’t have laugh lines and crows feetthe forehead crinkles of surprise and delighthave you even lived enough? A roundsoft tummy to lay my head in bed?Hell yes. What would we even talkabout otherwise? You’re onlyas old as I feel you are. If that’smale gazy you have my entire attention. I’m balding gray,… 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, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, 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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