A listicle promises order: twenty-six items, numbered, each one a small reveal. Catherine B. Krause's «26 Unexpected Places to Find Satan» borrows that familiar internet title and then delivers ten lines, three stanzas and not a single devil. What the reader gets instead is a woman followed through a run of baffling certainties, narrated so calmly that the nonsense starts to feel like a case file.
The first stanza is a catalogue of refusals in the past tense. She "scowled at the concept of 'socks'", and the quotation marks make socks sound like a foreign doctrine. The idea made her want to "microwave pineapples." Nail polish was "something she didn't believe existed." Look at the vocabulary: *concept*, *believe*, *existed*. These are words for faith and doubt, not for hosiery. Read beside the title, the stanza seems to treat ordinary objects the way a sceptic treats the devil, as something you can simply decline to believe in. That is an inference, but the poem supports it, since the verbs are about belief and the title is about Satan.
The second stanza begins "Now she's aware," and the tense shifts to the present. Disbelief gives way to a crowded, hostile awareness: the papers on her floor are "covered in wasps." Paper, the material of writing, is swarmed by stinging insects. Then comes a simile that explains nothing: "It's like on one foot she has half of her pants." The word *like* promises clarification, but the image is stranger than what it describes. Her clothing sits half on and half understood, and the foot that once rejected socks is now tangled in trousers. On the other foot, she "wants to hold onto snakes / and autographed poetry chapbooks." The pairing is funny and a little pointed. Snakes are the classic emblem of temptation, and the chapbooks are a gentle joke about how precious poetry souvenirs can be. This is also the only place where a sentence runs over a line break, as though the list of things she wants to keep is spilling out of its container.
The last stanza sounds like a verdict: "The two cannot co-exist." Yet "the two" has no antecedent, and the poem never says which two things it means. The next sentence, "One has to laugh at the sunset", uses the impersonal *one*, as if good manners required it. Then the stanza offers an either/or: "completely repair her computer monitor" or "sit in the light from her own mobile phone." It is a false dilemma, but it ends on the poem's most recognisable modern picture, a person alone in the glow of a screen after the sunset has been laughed at rather than watched. Judging by that image, the comedy has a faint sadness underneath it. If Satan is anywhere in the poem, he may be in that small, cold light.
The form keeps all this under tight control. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are long, plain and mostly end-stopped, each one a flat declarative sentence. The deadpan delivery does the comic work. The absurd content is never signalled with exclamation or emphasis, so the reader has to supply the surprise. A thin thread of sound runs through the poem in place of sense: the repeated *p* of *puppy, pineapples, polish, papers, pants, poetry, phone*, and the hissing *s* of *scowled, socks, snakes, sunset* that quietly leads towards the name in the title.
The poem matters because of how it handles explanation. Its phrases have the shape of reasoning, with "Now she's aware," "It's like," "cannot co-exist" and "either… or", but there is no content for them to carry. We read as we would click a listicle, expecting the hidden thing to be revealed, and the poem answers by showing how badly we want a reason. It also leaves us with a mood we can recognise even when the logic fails: a world of small domestic threats, broken screens and unexplained choices, described with perfect composure.