In this our second episode discussing work from poet Eli Karren, we’re shifting timelines, story lines, wine time, and coffee time. We welcome special guest, Tobi Kassim, as part of the podcast team for the day. (We’ll be “sprinkling” special guests throughout the upcoming season!)

We dig into Eli’s richly detailed poem “Franchise Reboot” which nods to David Lynch’s nineties TV phenom, Twin Peaks, along with the Museum of Popular Culture, Ikea furniture, Matthea Harvey’s poem “The Future of Terror,” and Wandavision, among other touchstones.

The team questions some of the advice we’ve received on what should or should not be included in poems: dreams, color lists, center justification, cicadas. It’s an airing of pet peeves, Slushies. And then we decide to get over ourselves. Tune in with a slice of cherry pie. As always, thanks for listening.

At the table: Tobi Kassim, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (Sound Engineer)

 @eli.james.karren on Instagram 

Eli Karren is a poet and educator based in Austin, TX. His work can be found in the swamp pink, At Length, Palette Poetry, and the Harvard Review.

Franchise Reboot

We sat at the diner in Snoqualmie 

quoting lines back and forth

to each other. Saying what we could remember, 

without fidelity, without 

choosing a character or a scene. 

We got the coffee, the cherry pie, 

took pictures with a piece of wood 

that the waitress passed across the bar, 

cradling it like a newborn. 

Earlier, we had gone to the waterfall, 

and I confessed that I had been

falling in love with a coworker. 

Or rather, that it felt that way. 

Melodramatic. Full of will they 

won’t they tension.

You said, expertly, that that 

was probably the only exciting thing about it. 

That not everything in life 

has to be a soap opera. 

Later that night, when you went off 

to chaperone a high school dance

I saw a movie 

about a woman who fucks a car.  

Outside the theater,

some guys smoked cigarettes

and wondered aloud if originality was dead. 

I told them that the only glimmer

of the original is the terroir, 

the local language, the dialect and vernacular. 

All the shit you suppress

when you move away

from your childhood home. The things 

you pay a therapist to excise from you

in a room comprised only 

of Ikea furniture. 

On the long Uber back to your house

I thought about the future of nostalgia,

the car careening through downtown Seattle,

past the Shawn Kemp Cannabis shop, 

and the Museum of Pop Culture, 

which held a laser light show on its lawn. 

The whole drive I had the words 

tangled in my brain and was trying to recite 

Matthea Harvey’s “The Future of Terror.” 

I remembered only the generalissimo’s glands 

and the scampering, the faint sounds

of its recitation humming below

the car’s looping advertisements 

for Wandavision. In my head 

the possibility of infinite worlds thrummed.

Once, at a farmers market, 

I watched an elderly man

wander through the stands, 

past the kids playing with pinwheels

and eating ice cream, 

a VR headset strapped 

to his face, his hat in his hand,

the muffled sound of tears

in his vicinity. I always wondered

what he had seen. 

What reduced him to tears

on a May afternoon, 

his hands splayed forward,

a little drunk with sun 

and regret, reaching out 

towards something.

III.

This, I tend to gussy up at parties. 

A lie I tell myself because I want 

to believe in true love. As I say 

in the diner the owls are not 

what they seem. But at what point 

does the false supercede the real? 

When you came home, I was crying 

on the couch, rewatching 

its rejection of closure.

Its protagonist catatonic 

for sixteen hours, a walking 

talking middle finger. 

Just so we can have this moment 

where he says the line 

and has the suit and we hear

the famous song 

and are embraced again. 

Seeing you, seeing old friends

this is how I always feel. 

Reminded of this pond

deep in the woods.

Somewhere I went to only once 

but keep returning to 

in dreams. 

I remember how we hiked 

an hour out

and slipped below the water

as the sun began to set.

In the dream, sometimes 

there is an island. Sometimes 

we swim to its surface. 

Sometimes the moon arises,

its gravity pulling us deeper

out above the blackness

where the shale slips

to the bottom. I’m never sure

if it is when I sink into the water or exit 

that I become someone else.

Wake always with a lyric 

on my lips. This 

is the me I’ve missed. 

The one that survives

the factory reset, the franchise

reboot. The one I dreamt

of every morning

when closure was something

to be evaded, treated 

like the cars in a Frogger game. 

But not here, with you, 

halfway across the country.

If I grasp gently, 

I can take the headset

from my eyes. 

I can almost see 

where the red curtains part

and the sycamores begin.