A guidebook promises you'll know a place better when you finish it. Catherine B. Krause's "The Insider's Guide to Washington, D.C." keeps that promise in an odd way. The city it maps is not the one on postcards. It is a city seen through smoke, cheap vodka and a restless, embarrassed mind.
The speaker sits on a curb across from Starbucks, smoking something called "scooby" with Francis, "the homeless rock artist," and reality loosens at once. "I blink and the shops become a gender-neutral / way to write Hebrew": storefront signs dissolve into script, as if the world were turning into text before her eyes. Then come penguins gathering at DuPont Circle Fountain for a flash mob, and a marriage proposal from Francis, met with a shrug: "Why not?" The poem runs on dream logic, and everything is accepted as it arrives. That deadpan tone is what makes it funny.
Into this haze drops one sentence from outside: "I don't think you've ever known hard times, said my father, and I hope you never will." There are no quotation marks, so his voice slides into the narration like a thought she can't switch off. The line is both loving and damning. It reminds the speaker that she is only visiting this curb. What follows reads like her answer: "I empty my wisdom into the ground behind / China Daily and say, Teach me to panhandle." The verb "empty" is deliberately bodily, so the inherited wisdom is something to be spat or poured out like waste. What she asks for instead is a lesson in hardship, as if it were a skill she could pick up.
The next scene turns that self-mockery on poetry itself. "The wind herds me into a diner where the cooks / don't think I understand Spanish." They joke, "Esta haciendo / la poesra" (as printed), roughly "she's making poetry," at the moment she breaks wind. The wind that pushes her through the street has become her own, and the art she may be practising is reduced to a bad smell. She understands the joke and says nothing, which makes her an insider in a slightly shameful sense. She hears what she isn't supposed to hear and keeps quiet.
Shakespeare arrives that night, and he is a drug dealer. He "tries / to sell me a bag of Tina successfully," with a misplaced adverb that leaves us unsure who succeeds, the salesman or the sale. Tina is street slang for methamphetamine. The speaker's revenge is small and cowardly: "I bite my thumb behind his back as he exits." Anyone who knows the opening scene of *Romeo and Juliet* will recognise the insulting gesture, and here it is made where no one can see it. The great poet becomes a seller, and the speaker can only snub him in secret.
The ending lifts the poem into stranger territory. "Three days later, in a room full of pigs / rescued from factory farms by the Holy Spirit, / I pour my insincerity into their books." The three days and the Holy Spirit give the scene a faintly religious air, and "spirit" quietly echoes the vodka at the start. The closing verb answers the earlier "I empty my wisdom into the ground." She has swapped wisdom for insincerity, the ground for books, and pouring out for pouring in. On this reading, the real confession is that she writes, or signs, or performs, without meaning it.
Formally, the poem is a single unrhymed block of twenty lines. Its sentences ignore the line breaks ("a gender-neutral / way to write Hebrew"; "behind / China Daily"), so it reads like someone talking fast, half-drunk, unable to stop. The short, flat sentences, "Why not?" and "Teach me to panhandle," keep the surreal events from ever sounding astonished.
What makes the poem worth reading is the gap between its comic surface and its guilt. It is a very funny guide that never tells you where to eat. It shows instead how it feels to be a comfortable observer who treats other people's hardship as material, and then to notice, honestly and uncomfortably, that she is doing it. By ending on "insincerity," the poem seems to point the finger at itself too, which is a risky and rather brave thing for a poem to do.