Poems About Boothville-Venice, Louisiana
Original poetry about Boothville-Venice, Louisiana by Mitchell Parfait : the end of Highway 23, Venice Marina, the Mississippi River Delta surrendering to the Gulf, and the last working coast of lower Louisiana.
By Mitchell Parfait · Dulac, Louisiana · Published October 25, 2025 · 7 min read · Boothville-Venice & Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana
This is the end of the road. Highway 23 terminates here, 75 miles below New Orleans, where the Mississippi River finally gives itself to the Gulf. The land barely holds. The water is winning.
Boothville-Venice, Louisiana — Where Highway 23 Runs Out
Boothville-Venice is the end of the road, literally. Highway 23 terminates here, 75 miles below New Orleans, at the southernmost incorporated community in Louisiana. Two communities merged in name: Boothville on the west bank of the Mississippi, Venice on the east. They are distinct in character but share the same geography of finality, the same knowledge that there is nowhere further south to go.
Venice is the jumping-off point for offshore oil workers, deep-sea charter fishing fleets, and the last shrimp boats still working the mouth of the river. This is the place where the Mississippi finally surrenders to the Gulf. The land is barely land: marsh grass, cheniere ridges, oil dock lights blinking at night over dark water. Visitors drive down 23 expecting something dramatic at the end and find instead something quieter and stranger, a place where geography simply runs out of options. La bout du monde, the Cajun French say: the end of the world. Boothville-Venice earns the phrase without irony.
Life in Boothville-Venice
Venice is the principal staging ground for Gulf of Mexico offshore oil platforms. Helicopter pads line the riverbank. Crew boats idle at the docks waiting for their shift rotations to depart. The workers who board them come from towns up and down the bayou coast, from Dulac and Chauvin and Montegut, driving south on 23 to work two-week hitches on platforms visible only as distant lights on a clear night. Venice is not where the oil is produced. It is where the workers begin and end their journeys.
It is also the deep-sea sport fishing capital of Louisiana and one of the most celebrated sport fishing destinations in the world. Venice Marina draws anglers from across the country chasing yellowfin tuna, blue marlin, and amberjack in the rich blue water of the Gulf. The same conditions that make the delta productive for commercial fishermen make it extraordinary for sport fishing: the nutrients the river carries 2,000 miles and deposits right here, at the mouth, feeding a food chain that bottoms out in fish the size of small cars.
Commercial shrimping and fishing continue, though the fleet is smaller than it was a generation ago. Cajun and Croatian fishing family names share the same docks, two distinct Catholic traditions that both made the water their livelihood and found this far corner of the country the right place to work it. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 nearly wiped out both communities. The rebuild was slow, measured in years and then in decades. Coastal land loss has accelerated since then: some cheniere ridges that existed in 2004 are gone now, swallowed by the marsh and then the open water. Le delta is not a fixed thing. It is the river's ongoing argument with the Gulf, still building new land at the mouth even as older land sinks and erodes elsewhere. The people who stay here understand they are living on a geography in active negotiation with the sea.
Featured Poem: End of Highway 23
In Mitchell Parfait's voice: a bayou man from Dulac driving south down 23 past Port Sulphur, past Empire, past Buras, until the road just stops and the Gulf is everywhere. He watches the crew boats head south toward the platform lights. He thinks about the river carrying silt two thousand miles to deposit it right here. The road ends. The water does not.
End of Highway 23
Past Port Sulphur the road thins.
Past Empire the levee is all there is
between the river and the sky.
Past Buras the marsh opens wide
on both sides and you feel
the road thinning under you
like a sentence running out of words.
Venice comes up without warning.
No skyline. No overpass.
Just docks and a parking lot
and the river wide and brown
and the Gulf somewhere past it,
waiting.
The crew boats idle at the dock.
Men in coveralls carry bags
like they are leaving for somewhere
ordinary, which I suppose they are:
a platform thirty miles out,
two weeks of work,
then back down 23 to start over.
I watch one boat push off south.
It gets small fast
and then it is just lights
and then it is nothing
and the river keeps moving
like it did not notice.
The shrimp boats here are smaller.
The nets look older.
A pelican lands on a piling
and does not move.
It has seen enough boats
to know this one is not bringing fish.
I think about the river
carrying silt from Minnesota,
from the Black Hills and the corn states,
from every watershed that drains
to the center of the country
and finds its way down here
to deposit itself at my feet,
still building ground
even as the ground I am standing on
is losing the argument with the Gulf.
The road ends at a guardrail.
A sign says DEAD END
in the way signs say things
without knowing what they mean.
The river did not get the sign.
The highway stopped.
The river didn't.
The poem closes on something plain and earned: The highway stopped. The river didn't. That is the essential fact of Boothville-Venice and of the Mississippi River Delta: human infrastructure runs out, but the river's work continues. The silt keeps coming. The land keeps shifting. The water keeps moving south toward the sea, indifferent to the road that tried to follow it. DULAC POETRY holds that knowledge from the inside.
Boothville-Venice in the Literary Landscape of the Gulf South
Boothville-Venice sits at the intersection of the Mississippi River Delta and the Gulf of Mexico, a place where American geography literally runs out. For Mitchell Parfait, whose poetry emerges from Dulac and the Terrebonne bayous, Venice represents the same fundamental truth: the water is always more permanent than the land. Dulac Poetry (amazon.com/dp/B0FXVZDLZG) finds its deepest resonance here, where the fisherman's world and the offshore worker's world overlap, where Cajun French and Croatian names share the same dock, and where the river's ending is indistinguishable from the sea's beginning. This is the far edge of the country, and Parfait writes from the knowledge of what it means to live where the road runs out but the water goes on.
From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.
DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon
Read Dulac Poetry
If the landscapes of lower Louisiana move you: the highway running out at the river's mouth, the crew boats pushing south toward the platform lights, the pelican on the piling that does not move, the river still building new ground at the edge of the Gulf. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world in verse. Available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. Written from inside the Gulf Coast, from Dulac, Louisiana, the bayou country that knows what it means to live where the land is always provisional.
DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Poetry from the end of the road, the river's mouth, and the water's edge.
Find more poems about lower Louisiana at Port Sulphur, Belle Chasse, and the bayou parishes of the Gulf South. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.
Poems from the Gulf Coast, the bayou, and the water's edge. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.
Poetry From the End of Highway 23
The road runs out. The river keeps going. The crew boats push south toward the platform lights. The pelican does not move from its piling.
Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac, Louisiana: bayou country, Gulf South, the inherited knowledge of water and loss that defines this coast. His book DULAC POETRY is available now on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).
Written from the Louisiana Gulf Coast waterways by Mitchell Parfait.