Before the first line, the reader meets a headline. Catherine B. Krause's title is built like a viral web article, with its "Here's Why," its "Stunning Visual," and its promise that people are being affected. Its subject is Kali, a goddess associated in Hindu tradition with time, death and fierce destruction, and she arrives flattened into content. Trauma becomes a trending reaction. The poem never mentions her again. That gap between a title that shouts and a poem that barely raises its voice is the first joke, and it points toward the poem's real question: what gets noticed, and what doesn't?
The opening line asks, almost idly, "Whatever happened to the invisible hunger in the sky?" The phrase is grand and unlocatable, a longing so large it has no address. But "Whatever happened to" is the language of nostalgia for a cancelled TV show, so the cosmic is delivered in a casual shrug. The next line drops to ground level: "scratching your initials under my desk." We are in a classroom, with a secret act of defacement. Only initials are left of the "you," and the speaker's wish to leave a mark, to make something exist, is as small and stubborn as a scratch.
Then the poem lurches. "One moment… the next" promises a cause-and-effect link, but none arrives. The speaker is "stalked by a Turkish-speaking man named Tom." The detail is absurdly precise and explains nothing, since the name and the language don't match. It reads like dream logic, or like scrolling through a feed where unrelated things sit side by side. The sound helps. "Scratching" and "stalked" share their hard *sk* and *k* sounds, so the gentle private mark seems to turn into pursuit. Someone is finally paying attention, but the wrong person, in the wrong way.
The poem's central image comes next: customs. "Seven customs officers didn't bother to read / when I passed them a slip declaring two kilos of cocaine / hidden in the vortex of my soul." Everything is deliberately mismatched here. The exact "two kilos" and the paperwork of a "slip" belong to bureaucracy, while "vortex of my soul" is pure melodrama, and the soul is treated as luggage. The speaker even does the honest thing and declares the contraband, yet nobody checks. The line break does quiet work as well. "Didn't bother to read" ends the line on a verb with nothing to read, so the reader is left, like the officers, with the text withheld for a beat. "Seven" has a fairy-tale ring, and the poem itself runs to seven lines. That may be coincidence, but it is tempting to hear each line as another official who glances and waves the speaker through.
The final lines turn defensive and then suddenly bare: "This is not to brag, / just to prove that I exist." The joke about smuggling is exposed as a plea. Everything before it, the initials, the stalker and the declared and ignored cocaine, becomes evidence offered in an argument for the speaker's own reality. The word "brag" is a nervous bit of social politeness, and the short final line has nothing left to hide behind.
Formally, the poem keeps to this plainness. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The long lines sound like someone talking, and the flatness of the delivery lets the last sentence land with force. Tonally the poem stays slippery, funny until it isn't, and the humor works as armor around a sincere feeling.
The poem matters, I think, because of how title and text press against each other. The title describes an image so striking that it spreads and provokes strong reactions. The speaker has a whole inner life, declared in writing, and cannot get it read. Read this way, the poem is about the attention economy, where a spectacle is noticed instantly and a person is processed without being seen. It offers no solution, only the small, stubborn claim of its last line.