It wasn’t even a real Namco game, I learn
from Googling. It was a bootleg. A better, tougher Pac-Man,
made by hackers. Instead of suing, Namco bought the rights.

We’re made to understand the female Pac-Man was key:
A circle wearing a bow, a female circle.
The McDonald’s toys were pink, the color of girl-toys.

·

I ask Kathleen about it over coffee. “That’s dumb,”
she says. “Let’s make the exact same game, except
with a bow in Pac-Man’s hair. The girls will love it.”

She also has lipstick, in fairness, and a beauty mark,
and eyes. You could argue she is gendered
and her predecessor, the featureless

yellow circle, is androgynous. But no,

·

no, Pac-Man must be a boy. Though I believed,
incorrectly, for as long as I knew something existed called a pacman

frog, that the frog existed first. The ghosts, never identified
as ghosts: Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde

become their female forms: Inky, Pinky,
Blinky, Sue. The female ghosts are
more sporadic, uncontrollable, more dangerous.

·

There’s a sound, like some electric siren, that permeates
Ms. Pac-Man. The sound of dots being swallowed? But no,
it still goes on when she’s not moving. Marc says
he thought it was just the sound Ms. Pac-Man makes.
Meaning not the character, the game.

·

More than your hair or brushing your hair, I miss
your ability to estimate sines and cosines,
your high Ms. Pac-Man scores, your blanket.
I can’t even find any of the records

you always played, let alone you.
Like a siren, or maybe someone saying
“Wow wow wow,” the game continually shocked
that it exists. Or the sound of ghosts.

·

I do not know which to prefer,
the beauty of pursuit
or the beauty of denouement,
the last dot in Ms. Pac-Man
or just after.

·

In a Youtube video, a thirteen-yr-old boy beats three levels
of Pac-Man blindfolded, following one path repeatedly,

increasing speed. The ghosts go where they must. Is that how
we know they’re ghosts, never being told by anyone, and not the monsters

·

they’re numbly labeled by instructions?
You couldn’t do that in Ms. Pac-Man,
there’s randomness and gender,

the humanness of ghosts unquestionably real,

the chorus relentlessly chanting, “Wow.”
Your emails come at the worst times. Damnit,
can’t you see I’m trying to be domestic?

·

Each note an invitation to cantilever words
along the interstate and frankly,
I just burned my wife’s breakfast.
“Well, what about you? Would you rather control

a female character?” She shakes her head.
“I really don’t like those games.”

·

Unlike Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man hints at plot,
with a crude animation every two levels.

Act 1: They Meet. Serendipitously a cartoon heart
is called into existence just above their heads.

Act 2: The Chase. Pac-Man chases Ms. Pac-Man
across the screen. Ms. Pac-Man
chases Pac-Man across the screen.

Act 3: Junior. A stork drops a baby
on the Pac-Men, who shares his father’s indescriptness

·

but nothing is resolved. The acts repeat indefinitely.
There could be a joke about that, but
this isn’t really that kind of thing.

Actually, Marc tells me, it does end. Around
level 150 the processor crashes,

·

so there is that.

For so long I believed that everyone
was lonely, poetry the only hope
for tiny slivers of connectedness.
It turns out I was wrong, it was
just me. But here,

·

I stall the ghosts until they’re
crowded in the corner, I wait
to eat my dot and strike. “What’s
that noise?” she asks. “It’s just

the game,” I say. She’s carrying
the mail, her reflection
on the screen reluctantly snaps
into focus as she opens the blinds.

__

Even with the narrative through line, I like to think of each section of this poem as a distinct movement, with its own rhythm and internal logic. The Stevens reference is a joke, but it’s also supposed to be a statement of intent, both about form and about the poem’s relationship to its subject.

Workshopping the poem taught me that there are poets who hate video games. I mean, they actually hate hate them; as in, want to eradicate them. I hope that both poetry and video games last as long as possible in the culture war, but I’ll gladly side with the winner when the time comes