✨ The Pershing Hotel

exotic to us...

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

From The View from Childhood: New & Selected Poems, Paraclete Press, Copyright © 2026. Used by permission of the publisher. Photo by Mick Kirchman, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.