Poems About Bohemia, Louisiana

Bohemia, Louisiana: Highway 39, the East Bank, and the Spillway That Shapes Everything South

South of Davant on Highway 39, the east bank of Plaquemines Parish narrows and the river begins its last long bend before splitting into the passes that carry it to the Gulf. Bohemia sits in this stretch, an unincorporated community on land that is defined as much by what the river does as by what the families here have built. The name is unexpected on this deep-south Louisiana corridor: Bohemia, as in la Bohème, an unexpectedly European word on a road that more often carries French names rooted in geography and memory. Nobody knows with certainty how it arrived here. What matters is what it became: a place name on the east bank of lower Plaquemines Parish, belonging now to this river and this ground as completely as any name that was born here.

The defining infrastructure of Bohemia is the Bohemia Spillway, a managed river diversion structure that allows controlled flooding of the wetlands and marshes east of the levee. La déversoir has been one of the most important tools for wetland restoration in lower Plaquemines Parish, a system that sends river water and sediment into the coastal marshes at scheduled intervals, building land and nourishing the ecosystem that protects the communities along this corridor. The spillway gates stand on the levee south of the community, the Mississippi on one side and the marsh on the other, and when the gates open the water moves in controlled sheets across the low ground east of the road. This is not an accident of the landscape. It is the landscape, managed and sustained by a structure that most people driving Highway 39 pass without stopping to look at.

The river bends south here toward its distributaries. The sky above the bend is enormous in the way that Gulf South skies get when the land is low and flat and the horizon runs without interruption. Highway 39 carries on south past the spillway toward Venice and the end of the road, and Bohemia sits at a point on that road where the landscape has already become something different from what it is thirty miles north: lower, more water than land, the marsh spreading east and the river pressing from the west. The east bank below Bohemia is the most marginal land in Plaquemines Parish. The community here has always known it.

The name from somewhere else. The place entirely its own.

Life in Bohemia: Shrimping Families, the Spillway, and the East Bank After Katrina

The families of Bohemia have worked the water and the levee road for generations. Shrimping and oystering are the core of the working economy here, as they are through all of lower Plaquemines Parish: the boats going out before light through the channels south of the community, the oystermen working the reef beds in flat skiffs, the shrimpers running trawls in the bays below the last of the east bank land. The levee road is the community spine, the single line of Highway 39 connecting Bohemia to the communities above and to the landing below. You do not pass through Bohemia by accident. You come down Highway 39 because the road brought you here.

The Bohemia Spillway changes the character of this stretch of the east bank in ways that are visible from the road. The wetlands east of the levee are noticeably more productive here than they are in the stretches without a diversion structure, the marsh thicker and more present, the bird life concentrated in the shallow water that the spillway creates during controlled releases. For the families who have always understood the marsh as the foundation of the working economy, the spillway is not an abstraction. It is the reason the oyster beds below the community have persisted as long as they have. The river builds the land here, slowly and deliberately, one gate opening at a time.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. The east bank of lower Plaquemines Parish took catastrophic damage. At Bohemia and the surrounding stretch of Highway 39, the storm surge overtopped the levees and floodwaters reached depths that destroyed structures that had stood through previous storms. Many families left. The return was slow. Some did not come back. Those who stayed found the ground altered, the fishing infrastructure damaged, the community smaller and quieter than it had been. Recovery on the east bank below Pointe-a-la-Hache has been incomplete in ways that are still visible twenty years later: empty lots where houses stood, the occasional slab without a structure, the community reduced to the handful of families who decided the river and the spillway and the marsh and the enormous sky over the bend were worth staying for.

Featured Poem: Bohemia

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the spillway gates in the early light, the river behind the levee bending south toward the passes, the shrimping and oystering families who have worked this east bank ground for generations, and the European name that arrived on this deep-south Louisiana corridor and became, over time, entirely this place. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a Gulf Coast bayou community that understands what it means to live where the water defines everything, to stay when staying is the harder choice.

The poem closes on the two lines that hold everything about this place: The name came from somewhere else. The river made it mean something here. The name Bohemia is not from this ground. It arrived from somewhere in the European imagination and settled onto this strip of east bank Louisiana, and over time the river, the spillway, the shrimping families, the storm surge, and the slow rebuilding worked on it until it became specific and irreplaceable. The poem earns that close by building through the spillway gates, the tidal knowledge of the oystermen, the flood, the families who stayed. The name came from somewhere else. Everything else here is entirely its own.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf South Voice That Names the Overlooked Places

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is present in every direction and the working life is built on the knowledge of tides and weather and the willingness to go out when conditions allow and come back when they do not. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the landscapes of coastal Louisiana with the specificity of someone who understands the east bank not as a road trip destination but as a place where real families have built real lives beside a river that has always had the capacity to end them. Bohemia belongs to this world.

The themes of Dulac Poetry are the themes of Bohemia: working-water life, the endurance that is not heroism but simply the daily commitment to staying, the beauty in the places that the national literary imagination has not bothered to name. The Gulf South voice does not perform grief or nostalgia. It finds the precise physical detail and stays there. The spillway gates before light. The oyster beds that know the river's timing. The shrimping families on the levee road. These are not metaphors borrowed from somewhere else. They are the textures of a life that has been lived on this specific stretch of east bank Louisiana for generations.

Plaquemines Parish east bank poetry is not a genre the national literary world has filled. The communities along Highway 39, from Braithwaite south to Venice, are among the most specific and least documented places in Louisiana verse. Parfait's work from Dulac, Louisiana reaches toward them because the working-water Gulf South is one continuous world, and the people who know Dulac understand what Bohemia means: the spillway, the enormous sky, the river behind the levee, the name that came from somewhere else and became entirely its own. The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If Bohemia holds you: the spillway gates on the levee east of Highway 39, the controlled flooding that builds the wetlands one gate opening at a time, the shrimping and oystering families who have worked this south Plaquemines corridor for generations, the storm that came over the east bank in 2005 and the handful of families who stayed. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou and the Gulf and the working-water life share the same understanding of what it means to build something beside water that could take it back.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the east bank levee road, the spillway structures, and the working communities of Plaquemines Parish and the Gulf South.

Find more poems about the east bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Davant, Pointe-a-la-Hache, Myrtle Grove, Triumph, and Buras. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Bohemia, Louisiana, east bank Plaquemines Parish, where Highway 39 runs south past the spillway gates and the river bends toward the Gulf. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.