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.