poetry
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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
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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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Found Poem
Another drop of poison and I’ll dream of foreign lands …where … here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather. Continue reading
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Dream Song No. 25
—Hand me back my crawl, condign Heaven. Tighten into a ball elongate & valved Henry. Tuck him peace. Render him sightless, or ruin at high rate his crampon focus, wipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us. — John Berryman 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 