Most poems ask to be admired. Krause's asks to be followed. Written in the brisk voice of a leaflet or a checklist, "What to Do When You're Homeless" hands the reader a string of orders: get a bag, call the hotline, spray the cot, take the money. The flat, practical tone does the emotional work. What begins as advice turns into an argument between survival and pride, and survival ends up having to shout.
The first stanza sets the method. "Don't freeze" is a command, but it also states the stakes in two words. The danger is not vague hardship but dying of cold. Then come the logistics. A suitcase is for those who "can afford it"; everyone else buys garbage bags. The detail is quietly devastating, since a person's belongings are packed in material made for rubbish. The instruction to "throw the rest of the box inside" shows a life in which not even spare bags can be wasted. The thrift is the poem's grimmest joke.
The irony sharpens in the second stanza. The shelter will "come pick you up. / They're nice like that. / They don't want you to freeze." The short sentences sound cheerful, but look at what is being praised: the bare minimum of not wanting someone to die. Gratitude and unease pull against each other, and the poem lives in the gap between them.
"Don't freeze" works as a refrain, opening the first, second and fourth stanzas and closing the poem, like a mantra repeated to keep going. It shifts as it returns. In the fourth stanza it is folded into a longer plan: "Try to get into a program so you won't freeze." Even long-term hopes are tied to this one fear. The third stanza is the only one without the refrain, because it deals with a different enemy, lice and bedbugs. "It's either your hair or the lice. / It's self-defense." The choice is left unexplained, and the compression is part of the effect. The military word "self-defense" turns a can of spray into a weapon and makes an indignity sound like a justification.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem is free verse built from short, mostly end-stopped lines that read like items on a list. The uneven stanzas (six lines, six, four, eight, three) suggest a list that grows wherever need demands. The rhythm is that of speech, clipped and imperative, full of fragments such as "Be patient. Things take time." Those two sentences sound like something a well-meaning official might say. The poem sets them down without comment, and their thinness is plain to hear.
The fourth stanza holds the turn. Its longest sentence is about a restaurant: "Remember you're not arguing with your brother / over who is picking up the check at Trop d'argent." The name is French for "too much money," and the line slips briefly into another life, one where paying the bill was a polite quarrel and generosity was a pleasure. The sentence spills over its line break, the only place the poem lingers. Then it snaps shut: "You're homeless, so show some humility." The "you" here may be the reader, but it also sounds like someone scolding themselves, as though pride must be talked down before it can do harm. That reading is an inference, but the harshness of the line supports it.
The ending drops the manual's calm. "Take the damn money. / Take it, / and don't freeze." This is the poem's only curse and its only stanza of three lines, and the repeated verb breaks the instruction into something closer to a plea. The refrain finally completes a sentence: the money is how you don't freeze. Pride and survival are reconciled, but not comfortably.
The poem matters because of the voice it chooses. Second-person instructions put the reader in the position of someone who must do these things, so sympathy is not offered from a safe distance. Krause gives no sunsets and no easy pity, only practical details, and she shows how dignity, for the person in the poem, has become a luxury they cannot afford.