Josephine Rowe | Poetry | Atlantic City via Cordite Poetry Review

Atlantic City

That was the year we came across the Pulaski Skyway. The middle of March, New Jersey stretching out before us like an old blanket they were trying to shake the dust out of. Eddie Rabbitt singing Well, I love a rainy night from the dashboard of every Pontiac Sunbird, every Chevrolet Chevette. We thought we’d get to the promenade and it would be there, waiting for us on the bleached herringbone of the boardwalk but we walked eight miles, up and then back and we did not find it. In the casinos rising from the rubble of the Traymore, of the Marlborough-Blenheim, we did not find it. We bought a souvenir globe from Bally’s Park Place and we shook it up, shook it up till it cracked and it spilled but it still wouldn’t say. In lucky dice, all-you-can-eat, bottomless coffee, nickela-spin, we did not find it. We put our make up on, fixed our hair up pretty but we did not find it: not in thin motel sheets or saltwater taffy, or between the pages of paperback bibles tucked into plywood drawers. We searched the eyes of the croupiers and card sharps but we did not find it, and the men who ran the rolling chairs were taciturn and breathless. We held our hands out to former Miss Americas in palm-reading parlours and they assured us that yes, it was there somewhere, muffled by the green felt of roulette tables, lost in a jangle of slot-machine song, in the bloody fallout from a nail bomb beneath the porch of a Philadelphia rowhome. But no, we did not find it, not in the brassy sweat of Kentucky Avenue clubs, prohibition memorabilia or the plastic cups of beer we drank in line for the blackjack game. And perhaps we never came any closer than the moon shining off the metal of defunct amusement park rides, cool steel of the big wheel felt though our clothes as we pitched our bottles into the sea and the wind bawled like an orphaned calf around the stumps of Million Dollar Pier. That was the year we came across the Pulaski Skyway. But we were too late, or too early, and we did not find it.

“Atlantic City” originally appeared in Cordite Poetry Review and has been reprinted with permission of the author.

Josephine Rowe is an Australian writer living in Oakland, California. Her writing has appeared in Narrative, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and on The Paris Review Daily, and she is the author of two short story collections, most recently Tarcutta Wake (UQP, 2012). She is currently a 2014-2016 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, will be published in 2016.