New Orleans
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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
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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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Stations of the Moss
I have made the Stations of the Moss. There is no better resurrectionfor a troubled soul this side of magic than to walk oak alley paths. Continue reading
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Do The Work
I recognized over a decade ago that writing wasn’t all inspiration. Yes, I revised and revised when I first started writing seriously, but I didn’t get up every morning and think: what am I going to write today. After my long silence ended last year I tried to focus on Doing The Work. I don’t… Continue reading
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The Last Temptation of Mark
I finished my Mardi Gras Day with a Buffa Burger, and stepped outside to order a car and vape while I waited. It was a busy day and my wait 25+ minutes, so I stood on the corner and considered the crowd around me. There was a young woman sitting alone at an outside table,… Continue reading
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Me…and my…puddle
Just the trees and the critters and me in the drizzly old live Oak stand. Two distant dog walkers exiting and later a guy in a Bebop cap and goatee idly wandering the lanes between the trees; looks like someone you mught bum a smoke or a light from just for an interesting bit of… Continue reading
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Hail Atlantis
All the news in and about New Orleans and I find myself drawn back to words I wrote 17 years ago. https://wetbankguide.blogspot.com/search?q=Atlantis+ 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 