poetry
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NaPo WriMo Day 2; War Day 27
My Radio Is Bleeding My radio is bleeding heinousnews of war and ethnic cleansing.Once this nation and its allieswent to war to stop atrocity.Now it cowers in fear of lobbyistswho insist it endorse the horror,as the innocent inmates huddlein the concentration campawaiting death or ethnic cleansing. History did not start in October.A few of us… Continue reading
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Letter to myself
I wonder what sponsor counseled the guy whowrote me the apology letter for fucking my wife.It started I believe that night in the restaurant barwhen I couldn’t take her or another drink andleft them alone with a pitcher of margaritas. I’m sure she must have written but I don’t rememberreceiving or reading her letter. I… Continue reading
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Ghazal for the Lost
I first I called this a ghazal because of the form, but then I said, this is not an amatory poem for the absent beloved. Until I realized it was. What is this land for which my grandfather weeps into his tea?My plot is cinder block and corrugated tin. The door has no key. What… Continue reading
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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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Is it speaking?
Excellent poetic advice from Julia Bloch from today’s Poem-A-Day “Valley Oak.” I laid the stems of letters across wet pages. Does itsit right at the hip? Is itin key? Is itmimetic? Is it lacy or sparking?Is it speaking? Continue reading
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Fire and Smoke
The habit Fargo winters could not kill,the wind swept chain link cage where in we wentto smoke, our coal end glowing in the snow,finds my half corona well intent to sit in searing heat suggesting itsthe end of things which others talk about,the dinosaurs’ revenge against the skythat left them liquifacted under stone. My watch… Continue reading
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Bohemian Dreams
The online French Quarter Journal published a story On the Origin of Jackson Square Artists: “They were a rowdy bunch” and I immediately thought of my father, Sidney J. Folse, Jr. A senior architect at the prominent local firm of Curtis & Davis, from the age before computer driven design when architects had to draw… Continue reading
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On the beach
The Sun surveys hiscoming kingdom of scorched sandand motionless scrub. Where will the heronnest when the barren shallowsflash only with shell? Will the snakes returnto the sea when nothing elsestirs in the blank dunes? A bleached forest of pilingslike the salted trees in thebareness behind. The oil platforms offthis pleasant beach like standingstones left by… Continue reading
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Beach Proem After Olson
Black welk fragments and tiny shiny bits just where the surf defines the tideline, I choose a spit of sand where the beach turns and set out. There are no sea birds here among the beach people but past the tented encampments terns glide and stride on the wet sand as I do. One walks… Continue reading
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Vita Brevis
I hear the singing of the undertowwhere the anxious waves come and go. I watch it greedily leachaway the hot, inconstant sand from underneathFellini’s beached monster. Across the flooded beachthe café girl, angelic. I cannot reachher distant innocence from here. I turn my back on the fantasticand light another cigarette. 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 