New Orleans
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Sad Baritone Saturday
A sad baritone blowing big round. Jello-tremulous Os of the blues. That’s what started this ramble into a pleasant melancholia, a fizzy afternoon beer buzz of sadness not quite cheerless, simply there like a color in the air, a sky so blue and clear you can hear it, a faint hum beneath your feet, a Continue reading
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Devil’s Beggartick
Several months under black contractor plastic to blank the slate upon which to draw a garden which instead draws the persistent Virginia creeper from next door, spreading its subterranean tendrils under the new laid mulch, taunting the gardener into contemplating the Round Up for poison ivy because you can’t buy Agent Orange at Lowe’s and Continue reading
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Drunk Bigots Blowing Shit Up
My German and French Acadian people, who arrived 50 years before the “American” revolution, were sold to “America” a century after they arrived here, unconsulted, along with the slaves in the fields and the “merciless Indian Savages” who showed the founders true democracy and were crushed for it. All just another colonial commodity to the Continue reading
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The One Who Vanished into Silence
My first wake-up-to-anxiety attack in more than a month, since I started changing medications to get the hell off Prozac which aggravated my REM sleep disorder. Personal stress meets the Big Bastardly Bill, the realization as Independence Day approaches at the constitutional United States is now a failed state, that everything I was raised to Continue reading
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Looks Like It Might Be Fixin’ To Storm Rag
Where should we direct our prayers now that the government is decommissioning hurricane weather satellites? I don’t do Catholic anymore so the city’s Lady of Prompt Succor is out. And many people in the United Christian States of America think that idolatry. Burnt offerings seem a bit much in our new heat regime, although the Continue reading
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The Surrender of New Orleans
The rode in our Mardi Gras Parades: ICE, La Migra, in an armoured car labeled Police (they are not; they can’t arrest anyone without a judicial warrant), in forest camo and tactical vests throwing beads and bobbing their heads on the 1 and 3 to the adjacent band. They rode through a city that would Continue reading
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Snowshoeing on the Red River of the North
What brought a boy from Bayou St. Johnto the frigid edge of the Red River of the North,on a sunny, windless 10° day in February,to strap on bentwood & gut beavertail snowshoes& crunch contentedly into the solitary snow? There was a single tree on an isolated spit of landbehind the adjacent subdivision where only I Continue reading
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Struck numb
Struck numbin the new yearby fresh horrors.The old yearscythes throughthe new, bodiesscattered likefirework wrappers.A year bornin blood and terrorwith politicianscrawling overthe mangled carcassfor the cameras. Monster truckzero to 60in four secondssilent electricengine twistscelebrationinnocentssheet metalinto horror.Does it matterwhich flagor religionthis broken mandeclared his banner? Each newhorror inspiresa lone Hero(he thinks)ready trainedto kill the Othermore horrificallyto honor Continue reading
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Washed Away
Jimmy Reiss, a prominent local businessman and then-head of the (New Orleans) Business Council, told the Wall Street Journal that the city would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically”, or he and other white civic leaders would not return. The Bricks laid carefully byCreole craftsmen demolished,replaced with mock historicalstick and Continue reading
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Three Years August (New Orleans 2008)
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 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 