poet
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Going Quiet in the Forest
For a forest friend Going quiet in the forest is exhilarant living.Leave your sugar frosted lattespeaker phone in airplane mode.Choose wild cherries and passion flowers.There are thrills in trills in the trees,the slow dance of coasting birds,frog song conga lines at dusk.Go quietly and with someonewho stoops to toad stools; stops, looksand listens with hawk-sharp… Continue reading
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Beautiful Things That Come Late in Life
I’m reading straight through Louise Glück, wondering how I missed her decades ago, why she didn’t leap out at me from some anthology, before I settled into reading the same dozen books over and over for the middle-class, mortgage part of my life, too busy with the kids. There are a raft of poems in… Continue reading
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Venice’s Relentless Tides
Fuck whoever is behind the crossbar.This is not about who was crucified and why. This is introduction to Western Civilization. Read the syllabus, do the work or you’ll nevermake it out of the auditoriums.This is not a safe space. This is the world you aspire to inherit in all its glorious horrorsa British Museum of… Continue reading
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His Harem
My Queen accused her borderline doddering monarch of cultivating a “harem” of admirers. This was never my intent, although I was most pleased to discover poetry could still have this effect upon women in this algorithmic age. I must confess the attraction is mutual, because I’m only emotionally and physically attracted to women who are… Continue reading
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Venus v. the Barbarians
I’m reading Bill Lavender’s book of poems, City of God, which combines commentary on our modern world and his thoughts on Augustine’s old book. at the same time I have found a blog, Via Negative, which frequently speaks to or shares images of the ancient Venuses whichever on my own mind of late. And somehow… Continue reading
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Green Pentecost
I was raised from childhood to place my hand in the Holy Roman wound and found it cold and hollow. Now I am waiting for that Pentecostal moment not in a close room but in the wood, for green fire like leaves to descend, teaching us the words of the birds and the subterranean language… Continue reading
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Surfing on the Shore
I want to salt my hands in sand bits of silica diamonding themin the blue green Gulf glare away from concrete monuments to misunderstood Jimmy Buffett—where pelican and heron at rest stand still and permit me to passon the hard sand at the surf line—two shore creatures in our element Continue reading
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ZAP!
I’ve got more issues than all the Marvel and DC comics ever published but I’m also colorful and entertaining. 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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