struggle
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2025
On The Centennial of Benito Mussolini’s Assumption of Dictatorial Powers in 1925 let us string piano wire like holiday tinsel and hang memorial ornaments to resistance, dangle the masked fatigue green monsters by their ankles while singing the carol of the partisan, crack poppers heard round the world and wear paper tricorn hats of Lexington Continue reading
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Devil’s Beggartick
Several months under black contractor plastic to blank the slate upon which to draw a garden which instead draws the persistent Virginia creeper from next door, spreading its subterranean tendrils under the new laid mulch, taunting the gardener into contemplating the Round Up for poison ivy because you can’t buy Agent Orange at Lowe’s and Continue reading
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Conquer the Impossible
It was impossible to make it through the tragedy Without poetry. — Joy Harjo Continue reading
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A poem is only non-violent
A poem is only non-violentif its edge is dull. No roseshere at the razor wire frontierof a future built with bones.There are no butterflies on the wire; your lover’spastoral visa is cancelledno dreamscapes; only nightmares.You can run to the lyric gardenbut you can’t hide. They’ll comefor the lovers and poetssure as Winston Smith. Your MasterCard Continue reading
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Old Black Joe
“I’m a comin’ I’m a comin ‘though my head is hanging low.” These lyrics were sung in some forgotten cartoon of my youth by a stereotypical bipedal hound dog. Only recently when they popped into my head a couple of times that I discover they were taken from the lyrics of “Old Black Joe” by 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 