Poems About Phoenix, Louisiana

Phoenix, Louisiana: The Name and the Irony It Carries

There is a town on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish called Phoenix. It sits along Highway 39, south of Jesuit Bend and north of Bohemia, on a stretch of levee road that most people pass through without stopping. The name is classical, drawn from the bird that burns and rises from its own ashes. Someone chose it for this small Louisiana community, and whoever they were, they could not have known what August 2005 would bring. Hurricane Katrina overtopped the east bank levees at Phoenix and flooded the town. The storm did not know the name either. It came anyway. And what happened after, the slow, difficult, deliberate work of coming back, turned a name that was already poetic into something that does not need any embellishment. Phoenix, Louisiana. The irony writes itself. The people living it did not have time to notice.

Life in Phoenix: Citrus Groves, the East Bank, and the Families Who Rebuilt

Phoenix is an unincorporated community. There is no municipal boundary that marks where it begins and ends, only the highway, the levee, and the names on the mailboxes. The east bank of Plaquemines Parish below New Orleans is like that, a string of communities along Highway 39 where the Mississippi River runs just behind the levee and the distance between one settlement and the next is measured in minutes of driving. Before Katrina, Phoenix had citrus groves. The east bank parishes below the city have long been citrus country, the climate and the rich alluvial soil producing satsumas and navel oranges that were sold throughout Louisiana. The groves were part of the working landscape, part of what families here did to stay on this land.

When Katrina came through in 2005, the east bank levees at Phoenix were overtopped. The water came fast and it came from above, pouring over the concrete and into the streets and houses below. Les cendres, the ashes, is the French word for what fire leaves behind, and what Katrina left in Phoenix was something close to that, a community stripped to its foundations, the citrus groves ruined by saltwater, the houses flooded out, the Highway 39 corridor that connected these families to each other and to the world south suddenly impassable. The rebuilding took years. Some families did not come back. The ones who did rebuilt not because it was easy or smart or safe in any guaranteed sense, but because Phoenix, Louisiana, was where they were from and they were not done with it.

Featured Poem: Phoenix, Louisiana

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the east bank levee road on Highway 39, the citrus groves that saltwater killed, the families who came back to a name that was always bigger than what any of them were supposed to carry. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou teaches the same things the east bank teaches: that the water does not consult the name on the map before it rises, and the people who stay are the ones who know that and stay anyway.

The poem closes on the line that holds everything this place is: The name was already there when the storm came. Phoenix did not get its name after Katrina as some act of hopeful rebranding. The name predates the storm by more than a century. That fact, ordinary and not symbolic at all from the perspective of the people who lived there, becomes something else entirely when the water arrives. That is the kind of truth DULAC POETRY refuses to dress up.

Phoenix and the Themes of Dulac Poetry

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is never far and the question of staying is never fully settled. His collection Dulac Poetry returns across every poem to the same core: endurance without theater, loss acknowledged without grief performed for an audience, and the act of staying in a place that gives you reasons to leave. Phoenix, Louisiana, belongs to that world completely. The east bank of Plaquemines Parish on Highway 39 is not a place people move to for the amenities. It is a place people stay in because they are from it, because the land holds something that does not transfer to another address, because the families who rebuilt after Katrina understood that the act of rebuilding was itself the answer to the question the storm asked.

Mitchell's poetry does not romanticize that choice. It witnesses it. The citrus groves that saltwater killed, the levees that overtopped from above, the quieter highway where neighbors used to wave: these are not metaphors in Dulac Poetry. They are the actual textures of the actual place. That is what the best Louisiana poetry does, and it is what Mitchell Parfait does from his home in Dulac, writing about communities he knows from the inside. DULAC POETRY is available now in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If the landscapes of the east bank of Plaquemines Parish hold you: the Highway 39 corridor south of New Orleans, the citrus groves that grew in alluvial soil until the saltwater arrived, the tight communities between Jesuit Bend and Bohemia, the east bank levees that Katrina overtopped in 2005, and the families who rebuilt in place because that is where they are from. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world without softening it. Written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou teaches the same thing Phoenix, Louisiana teaches: the water knows the name on the sign. It comes anyway. The people who stay are the ones who already knew it would.

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

Find more poems about lower Louisiana at Jesuit Bend, Davant, Braithwaite, Pointe-a-la-Hache, Grand Bayou Village, and the bayou parishes of the Gulf South. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from the east bank citrus country and the Hurricane Katrina corridor of Plaquemines Parish, where the name Phoenix was already on the sign before the storm arrived. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.