Episode 146: Don’t Put Dreams in Poems?

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.

You can listen to Episode 146: Don’t Put Dreams in Poems? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 146: Don’t Put Dreams in Poems? is an episode from Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile by Painted Bride Quarterly.

This episode is 44:12 long.

This episode was published on Nov 12, 2025.

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