I hope someone is playing Pokemon right now while reading my poem and I hope they take a screenshot at the same time they are reading my poem about them playing Pokemon. Everyone wants to talk to me about my Pokemons. My coworker who never plays games wants to talk to me about my Pokemons. My boss who yelled at all of us for being on our phones at work wants to see my Pokemons. Everyone wants to talk about my Pokemons except for the people who are grumpy about Pokemon, but then it turns out that they want to talk to me about Pokemon too. In 2006, there were memes that pretended that cats were huge obsessive Pokemon fans and included photos of frantic-looking cats with Pokemon cards or games. All of the cats in the memes said “LET ME SHOW YOU MY POKEMONS”. Right now, we are all those cats. I am looking for monsters in public art sculptures and in murals. Everyone warns me about the train arriving, the cars passing the lights changing but nobody warned me about the uneven sidewalk where I tripped. I still don’t know if a Pokemon is a monster or a pet. We leave the windows open so monsters can come in. Pokemon bros voices also come in. My building is a Pokestop, so suddenly everyone is extremely interested in the fact that our building was built in 1904. I saw a man dragging an office chair to all of the Pokemon gyms in my neighborhood. Every night after the deli on mystreet closes, an enormous crowd sits in the deli’s outdoor patio chairs.
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Valerie Loveland is the author of Reanimated Somehow. Her poetry has been featured in Dzanc Book's anthology Best of the Web and the Massachusetts Poetry Festval. She enjoys running, silent movies, audio poetry, and is a Computer Science student in Boston, Massachusetts.