The Pokémon Go People

Not pretending to be shopping,
they canvass cobblestoned Water Street, near-sighted
as beach sweepers, their devices feeling ahead
for which alleyway, or corner of a yard,
might sprout a Snorlax, a purple Aerodactyl.

“These are the Pokémon Go people,” explains a villager
to her guest, careful not to point as one group passes,
their jean shorts to mid-shin, arms arabesqued
with dates or skewered hearts, some steering strollers.

Scattered among the eighteenth-century colonials,
the Improvement Association’s clapboard plaques
remember Hale, ship captain, and Stewart, joiner,
each calling stenciled right beneath the name.
In this new life, vocation’s not so certain—

assignments can vibrate at any time, the location
of a needed creature flash, then disappear.
You almost have to be waiting there already,
disconsolate after a day of nothing
as light drains at the former hotspot in Cannon Square.

When two wild Pikachu clamber
over the rocks, the woman shrieks and punches her partner,
to make sure he’d seen. A postcoital quiet
on their drive back home to Pawcatuck.