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.
