New Orleans
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Three Years August
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 wind, Continue reading
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Calf foot blues
Stock bones boiling in this pot black, hissing gas ring hot night, a slow reduction to the elemental in the fan-stirred simmerof this gelatin evening. Continue reading
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Interrupted by Hummingbirds
Compose your life like a prose poem suddenly interrupted by hummingbirds mistaking a woman’s perfume for wildflowers in Arles. A fast and bulbous moon the only excuse necessary for hallucinatory episodes at the Starbucks counter, visualizing Cthulhu in the foam and blocking the concoction of monstrous coffee drinks. When confronted with a Don’t Walk sign, Continue reading
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Siriusly
Venus is sinking. The moon is fleeing. The air is a breathless bath-water smothering. The rain is elsewhere. The clouds have flown. The dogs are all weary. The crickets are silent. The sun is waiting, just over the horizon, ready for another chorus of those Summertime Blues. 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
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The Slow Noon Burn of June 16
Originally posted on June 20, 2009 on my Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans blog Canal Street in the slow noon burn of June. Thin dribbles of tourists pass up and down, hug the narrow ledge of shade along the buildings as if some abyss yawned at the curb. A handful of hotel Continue reading
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The Old New Orleans
I was locked out of Lakeview NextDoor for three days after I called out a woman who said the poor services at the West End Walgreens was likely due to “corporate DEI” goals or quotas, I forget which and can’t see her post again for three days. My first comment was, “wow, did you really Continue reading
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Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine
No serious hope of ever publishing this so sharing here for those who remember The Goldmine is an old biker bar,where Galloping Gooses once drainedOdyssean pitchers of the Champagneof Bottled Beer in the dark of afternoon. Now college girls & their boys &the old men who want to fuck thecollege girls dance in the wee Continue reading
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The Vast White Ring Conspiracy
<img alt=”A ring of men in white hoods standing around a fire holding torches.”> * Perhaps it’s wrong to reuse a title. When I first coined this on The Wet Bank Guide it was to taunt both then-mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin and the white ring that binds it. The phrase came back to 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 