poetry
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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
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Dymphna, Patron of the Mad
I am reading On A Wednesday Night poems from the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans, and discovered a saint story I don’t recall from my confirmation Book of Saints. That is likely because I had the boy’s edition, from which we were to select our confirmation name. I chose Thomas after… Continue reading
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Touched with fire
“Sufficient anxiety is its own / persistent meditative state.”. – K.S. Reading an MFA anthology of a program I’m interested in and halfway through I come across a poem that makes me think: bipolar disorder. Most students have two or three poems and she has only one. I hope she made it. I recently met… 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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Well Bottom Blues
—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, Dream Song No. 25 In August 2005, not only the levees of New… Continue reading
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The Consumation of Grief
I even hear the mountainsthe way they laughup and down their blue sidesand down in the waterthe fish cryand the wateris their tears.I listen to the wateron nights I drink awayand the sadness becomes so greatI hear it in my clockit becomes knobs upon my dresserit becomes paper on the floorit becomes a shoehorna laundry… 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 