Poem of the Week

Real Simple

Donna Masini

A place for everything and everything

so pretty! Whatever condition

you find yourself in, however untidy

the closet, here’s a solution. Order

for any drawer, container for any fruit

or feeling. No more dead vegetables!

Leftover memories? Glass jars let you

see what’s inside. Stacked by size

they keep and keep.

I bought a subscription for my mother.

When she wakes at night, crying for my father,

sweating her sheets with grief, she turns

a few pages, thumbs the hints and fixes,

the leftovers in their pretty coffins. Night after

night she reads herself to sleep. I am her daughter,

awake in bed with grammar books,

studying the conditional:

If you die you are dead

If you die you will be dead

If you died you would be dead

If you had died you would have been dead

If you hadn’t been afraid to die you would have lifted your face.

The Yale Review · “Real Simple” by Donna Masini

how did this poem begin for you?

In my notebook entry for 2/16/21, I see the notes “conditional,” “simple,” “Real Simple,” and “My mother had a bad night,” followed by a rough draft of this poem. It was the pandemic. I was unable to take the bus to New Jersey to visit my mother, who was alone in lockdown at her assisted-living place. My father had died two years before. I was studying the conditional mood in Italian, the kind of thing that gives me a sense of order—the comfort and structure and certainty you might find in the clear, simple design of Real Simple magazine, with its unambiguous and paradigmatic promise of beautiful containment. A world in which nothing bad can happen.

Donna Masini is the author of five books, including Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, the Best American Poetry series, and other outlets.