We at The Metropolitan Review are delighted to have two poems by Donna Masini.
Masini’s poems use wry humor to make observations about the world, language, and paradoxes we just can’t escape. Her observations about life are inimitable, and her use of speech, word play, and questions — both profound and humorous — create poems that capture the essence of what it means to be an artist in a world that tries desperately to restrict creativity.
Please enjoy these wonderful poems, which appear in our inaugural print issue.
—The Editors
To the Woman in Window 8 at the DMV I’m sorry I didn’t have what you called the original copy of my birth certificate. I did bring my official infant footprints. They’re nothing like my feet now, but it did say Certificate of Birth. Yes, it was a Xerox. Tell me, how can an original be a copy? Maybe you had a disappointing lunch. Couldn’t find a parking spot. Don’t even drive. I don’t drive. You could see that from my expired learner’s permit. I was only asking for a REAL ID. What is real, Window 8? It seems to me nothing could be more real than my 2¾ inch infant foot. I’m terrified of dying. Driving. I’m sorry that, paying you for the useless-for-federal-purposes-non-driving ID, I saw you type in the wrong birthdate. I wasn’t born in 1931. You did ask me to check for accuracy. My father was born in 1931. If he hadn’t died four years ago, he might have made you laugh. But maybe he’d have been just another old guy at your window waiting to die. A few years before he died, my father had to stop driving. That was terrible. There were many terrible things in my life, Montaigne says, and most of them never happened. I would like to read more Montaigne. When your father dies, I hope you’ll be with him, peering into his fogging oxygen mask. I held my father’s arm, thanked him for everything I hadn’t thanked him for as I stomped around in my glowering adolescence. Have you tried meditation? Smoldering rage isn’t good for our hearts. It’s a heartbreaking world. Entropy. Dirty Money. They are bombing hospitals. Maybe you were imagining the Sixth Extinction. Even one is terrible. Have a baby anyway. I wish I had. With the right mix of genes and circumstance you could’ve been my daughter. Listen, someday what will be left of us—a few teeth, pitted bones— Did you even look at my footprint? Miraculous, isn’t it? I wonder why prehistoric walls aren’t covered with baby footprints. Have you seen those caves? Like giant hand-covered wombs. That woman in your head—there are ways to stop her. Anger can mask grief. So much to be angry about: proliferating viruses, economy seating. Screw the DMV, Window 8. I wish your window had a lake view, and cardinals singing their unmistakable cheer. A window needn’t be a cage. The phone numbers of my dead are floating up inside me. I’m not sure I agree with Montaigne. Terrible things are real even if they happen only in our minds. I wish the birth of anything were so miraculous no one could ever bomb a hospital. I wish I’d been nicer, sooner, to my father. Suffering is a choice. If your feet hurt as you walk, the Buddhists say, think about the absence of pain in the foot that lifts. Focus on relief, you’ll feel relief. We suffer so much, trapped in our windows, thinking we’re looking through them. I’ll never see you again, Window 8. My dead friends? I’ll never dial their numbers again. Two weeks from now, when my useless non-REAL ID arrives in my mailbox, I’ll think of you and I will remain, always, ticket 4180
Clams The man has ordered Spaghetti with Clam Sauce. The woman is not fond of clams. In fact, she is not as fond of this man as she once was. The man begins to twirl the spaghetti around his fork, displacing several clams. He is frowning. She thinks of the expression “happy as a clam.” How happy could a clam be? She tries to imagine what a clam might look like, happily swimming around the ocean with the other clams, but she can’t picture this. They’d need fins—or legs—to even crawl. Maybe they just bob around like chunks of carrot in a soup. How happy is that? She wishes she knew what clams looked like still alive in the ocean before they were dead on someone’s spaghetti. So many things she’s never thought to imagine. She would ask the man, but he gets annoyed when she asks things like that. Things she should just know. He is not a happy man. She’d like to ask the waiter, but the waiter isn’t looking too cheery either. She looks into the tangle of spaghetti, the juicy castanets in their parsley confetti. A gathering of smiles looking positively chatty! Still, she’ll Google it when she gets home. Clams swimming. She would like to know more about clams.
Donna Masini’s new book, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? (W.W. Norton and Co.) will be out in Spring 2026. Her other books include 4:30 Movie, Turning to Fiction, That Kind of Danger, and About Yvonne, a novel. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, et al. She lives in NYC and teaches at Hunter College.
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Love these poems.
Heartbreaking and delightful poems. I hope I dream of swimming clams tonight.