Poems About Westwego, Louisiana
Bayou poetry about Westwego, Louisiana by Mitchell Parfait — the Shrimp Lot, the Harvey Canal, the West Bank waterfront before the marsh takes over, the bridge crossing behind you and the river moving south.
By Mitchell Parfait · Dulac, Louisiana · Published June 25, 2026 · 7 min read · Westwego, Louisiana & West Bank Jefferson Parish
The Huey P. Long Bridge behind you, the Mississippi curving south, the Westwego Shrimp Lot holding on at the edge of a city that stops here — where the working waterfront meets the beginning of the marsh and the road runs out of city to give you.
“West, We Go”: The Edge of the City
Westwego sits on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish — the Huey P. Long Bridge crossing behind you, the Mississippi curving south toward the delta and the Gulf. This was the last American city before the river marshes took over: a working port, shrimp boats and oyster luggers, fish houses along the Harvey Canal, a waterfront that ran on the tides and the seasons and the price of brown shrimp in a given year. The name itself is a pun from the 1880s — “West, we go!” — a railroad promoter's pitch for a terminus that would open the lower Mississippi delta to commerce. The railroad came. The delta opened. Then the town became a fishing and canning town instead, which is what the land and the water wanted it to be all along.
Mitchell Parfait is from Dulac, Louisiana — the bayou country one estuary east, Terrebonne Parish, Bayou Grand Caillou running south toward the Gulf through the same kind of marsh. He knows this West Bank geography as the edge of the world he grew up in: the place where the city runs out and the water takes over, where the names on the map are outnumbered by the names the fishermen have for the channels and the turns.
Life in Westwego
The Westwego Shrimp Lot is one of the last open-air working waterfronts in metro New Orleans — boats unloading brown shrimp in season, ice trucks backing up to the dock, the smell of brine and diesel that has been the smell of this particular corner of the West Bank since before anyone alive was born. La rivière defines this bank: the Mississippi is not background here, it is the reason for everything — the bridge, the port, the fish houses, the town's existence as the last city before the river marshes win. You live on the West Bank because the river put you here, and the river is always visible, always moving, always reminding you which direction is south.
The Harvey Canal cuts south from the river toward the Barataria Waterway — once the spine of the Harvey Canal Industrial District, fish houses running along the banks, seafood processing plants that ran around the clock in season. Most of those fish houses are gone now, the industrial district quieter than it was, but the canal still cuts south and les crevettes — the shrimp — still come up the Barataria Waterway into it in season. The Shrimp Lot holds on. It is the kind of institution that holds on by the labor of the people who work it, not by any force of preservation or economics.
Bayou Segnette State Park sits just behind the levee — boatlaunch, camping, the marsh that starts the moment you cross the road from the residential streets into the grass. The Westwego Historical Museum keeps the town's record: the railroad that gave the place its name, the canning industry, the fishing economy that replaced the railroad dream. Le chemin de fer — the railroad — rusted into the levee grass a long time ago, but the name it left behind is the name that stayed. Katrina hit the West Bank in 2005 — less severe than Lakeview or the Lower Ninth Ward, but real enough, the water coming over in places, the working-class neighborhoods recovering slower than the ones with more to recover with. Post-Katrina Westwego is still the working West Bank: the Shrimp Lot, the canal, the park, the levee, the marsh beginning right where the levee ends.
Featured Poem: The West Bank
In Mitchell Parfait's voice — he crosses the Huey P. Long Bridge in the early morning, the river wide and brown and moving, always moving, the bridge's steel arch above him, the sun hitting the water between the girders. He comes off the bridge into Westwego before the morning heat settles in. At the Shrimp Lot, the boats are already in from overnight, the ice trucks are backing up, and the work of the day has started without waiting for anyone.
The West Bank
I come off the Huey P. Long
before the morning heat settles in,
the river wide and brown behind me,
always moving,
the bridge's steel arch still in the mirror,
the sun cutting through the girders
and hitting the water
the way it always does —
like it has something to prove
to the river,
which is not impressed.
Westwego in the early morning
before the heat takes it.
The streets still cool from the night.
The smell of the canal already up —
brine and diesel and the particular
weight of river air
that means you are at the edge
of where the city runs out
of things to give you.
At the Shrimp Lot,
boats in from overnight.
Ice trucks backing up slow
to the dock,
the beeping of them
the only loud thing
in the morning.
Le chemin de fer.
The railroad that named this place,
that brought the promoter's dream west,
that opened the delta
and then rusted
into the levee grass
while the shrimpers stayed.
I walk the dock.
A deckhand hosing shrimp
into a bin,
not looking up.
The motion of his hands
the same motion
his hands will make
two hours from now,
and two hours after that.
I know this kind of labor —
the hands that do the same thing
so the rest of the world
can eat.
The river doesn't care
which bank you're on.
It moves the same on both sides.
The poem closes not in elegy but in plain statement: the river doesn't care which bank you're on — it moves the same on both sides. That is the West Bank truth. The forgotten side, the working side, the side that does the labor. The river does not distinguish. It moves through Westwego the same way it moves through the French Quarter. The difference is what you do with it — and what this bank did was work. DULAC POETRY holds that knowledge — the working waterfront, the hands on the dock, the labor that the rest of the world depends on and rarely names.
The West Bank in Louisiana Letters
The West Bank is the forgotten side of New Orleans literature. Tom Piazza's City of Refuge is a Katrina novel rooted in the working-class neighborhoods that the French Quarter and the Garden District fiction rarely reaches. Jesmyn Ward's Bois Sauvage is fictional but rooted in the Gulf South working class — the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the towns that do the labor the city runs on. New Orleans literary culture clusters in the French Quarter, the 9th Ward, the Garden District, and misses the working waterfront entirely: the Shrimp Lot, the Harvey Canal, the fish houses that ran until they didn't. Mitchell Parfait is the inside voice in that gap — a man from Dulac, one estuary east, writing about the fishing towns that surround New Orleans and make it possible, the towns that feed it and dock the boats it never sees. The Westwego Shrimp Lot is a dying institution, like so many others that Mitchell's poems hold — not in elegy, but in the plain language of someone who was there and knows what it meant to be there.
From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.
DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon
Read Dulac Poetry
DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99). Written from Dulac, Louisiana — Terrebonne Parish, Bayou Grand Caillou, the Gulf South waterways where a man learns the river from childhood and never stops reading it. The West Bank is where Louisiana's fishing economy meets the edge of the city — le bout du monde, the end of one world and the beginning of another. The Westwego Shrimp Lot, the Harvey Canal, Bayou Segnette, the levee with the marsh starting on the other side — all of it held in the same working-water knowledge. The book is on Amazon now.
Poems from the Gulf Coast, the bayou, and the water's edge. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.
If you are looking for poems about Westwego Louisiana — or for Gulf South poetry about the West Bank of Jefferson Parish, the Westwego Shrimp Lot, Bayou Segnette, the Harvey Canal, and the working waterfront that holds the edge of New Orleans before the marsh takes over — this is where that work lives. DULAC POETRY is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0FXVZDLZG. Written from inside the working-water world, by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana — one estuary east, the same tides, the same knowledge of a river that moves the same on both sides.
Read alongside poems about Barataria, Louisiana and poems about Crown Point, Louisiana to follow the West Bank south from Westwego into the Barataria Basin. Then read about DULAC POETRY on the book page, or learn about Mitchell Parfait on the author page.
DULAC POETRY — Westwego Louisiana poetry on Amazon. Get Your Copy on Amazon | Buy the Book | Read Dulac Poetry
Poetry From the West Bank
He comes off the Huey P. Long before the morning heat settles in. At the Shrimp Lot, the ice trucks are backing up and the work has started without waiting for anyone. The river doesn't care which bank you're on. It moves the same on both sides.
Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac, Louisiana — bayou country, Gulf South, the inherited knowledge of water that defines this coast. His book DULAC POETRY — 45 pages of bayou, Gulf Coast, and the working-water world — is available now on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).
Written from the Louisiana Gulf Coast waterways — by Mitchell Parfait.