Memory
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Gone
I don’t have a memory like a sieve:I have a memory like the big asscolander you use to drain spaghetti with the huge holes you could drive a whole day right through and out of sight, with all its names faces dates flavors aromas chocolate ice cream stains down your shirt the kissthat made you Continue reading
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The Man Who Knew Godot
Long ago when I first started as an undergraduate I was at a bar speaking to an old man and told him I was an English major and he asked me to recite a poem. I couldn’t. Maybe I could manage Poe’s The Bells for I had that by heart once. Memorizing poetry was a Continue reading
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Ad Odd Fellows Memorial Day
An excerpt of a longer piece originally published on Toulouse Street – Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans. I was born in 1957 and so I am reckoned by some one of the last of the baby boomers, that generation borne by the parents who went through World War II. I grew up in Continue reading
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If on a winter’s night a crisp crackling hiss
Outside it was minus 41 farenheit, ambient, in the bright, white night. Inside it was 1910 Craftsman all original except the electric stove and water heater circuit, the rest cloth hung from glass posts. You could measure in hands how much horsehair was left in the frigid wall, between seven and ten. The windows were Continue reading
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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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Churn and Taxis
The back of a Toyota Uber pales against the Rocket V-8 Cab Rasta madman who took our drunken asses back to Carrollton when the green streetcar failed to appear on Canal. His rattletrap blue GM something rang like a Jamaican sleigh over the potholes, & when his glove box popped open, spilling fat spliffs into 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 