Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Paradiso

The View from Childhood

Atlantic City, NJ

We didn’t know it was seedy. But still

we should have guessed—the hawkers, the barkers,

the lewd souvenirs, the dank boardwalk smell,

the sand studded with cigarette butts,

these the sad and certain markers

of decay and decline we were blind to.

We loved the pleasures of the place,

the wild and briny sea, the sun that burnt

us brown, ice cream and roasted nuts,

long nights and longer days

we lived a carnival life, then learned

that all of it was cheap, left it behind to

find a paradise that wasn’t wrecked.

So long ago. We haven’t found it yet. 

“Lucy the Elephant is a six-story elephant-shaped example

of novelty architecture, constructed of wood and clad in tin in 1882 by James Lafferty in Margate City, NJ, five miles south of Atlantic City.”

—Wikipedia

Lucy was huge. Towered above us

like some weird Victorian dream

of the exotic, set here by this

practical shore of rum runners

and whores, amblers and gamblers

out to make a buck however they can.

My cousins and I would climb the stairs and scream

with delight when we reached her eye, scan

the ground for our mothers who stood beneath,

her big gray legs, her platter-sized feet

dwarfing them. They were not small women,

but Lucy made them so. The world seemed

as if we could hold it in our hands,

their little lives below some foreign land. 

The Pershing Hotel

Atlantic City, NJ

1965

The rooming house was exotic to us.

The iron headboards on the two big beds.

The narrow stove with its black gas jets.

The hotplate where our Mom would set the pot

of meatballs and sugo she brought from home

for our supper five nights in a row.

We would sit on the bed, plates of pasta

balanced on our ten tanned knees, chunks of bread

to wipe up the sweet and salty sauce.

Then trips to the bathroom down the hall,

the tank with its pull chain hung from the wall.

We loved it. We loved it all.

Slept in the same room. Breathed the same air.

Back home I would wish we were still there. 

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD, is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University, where she serves as Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024. She is currently at work on the manuscripts of two new collections, one tentatively titled Body Songs, poems on embodiment, and The View from Childhood, poems about family, coming of age, and the place(s) we call home.