Seventeen
Eli Karren | Poetry, Fall 2026
No songs like the songs you heard at seventeen.
The ones smuggled off campus by an older sister,
a camp counselor, some Magi who’d appear
for holiday break bearing mixtapes
and USB drives. They who’d return home
sporting the tees of bands they’d seen
at Fallfest, at basement shows, emo bands
with horrible names and indie rockers
with teardrop tattoos. That winter
when I could first drive a car, I had Rudy
who appeared like a Dickensian ghost
in the dish pit alongside me, offering
the good word of Matador Records: of Pavement,
Cat Power, Boards of Canada, the Jon Spencer
Blues Explosion. No backroads like the backroads
I knew at seventeen. Haunted with overgrown maples.
Mist rising through the slats of the covered bridge.
Sometimes I still dream of idling
outside the houses of the boys I grew up with,
flicking my headlights and waiting for them to appear,
one leg then another, dangling and dropping
from a second story window. Sometimes they are gaseous.
Sometimes with bodies made of static. Still,
we are going to the quarry, to the reservoir, to smoke
and wander the trails that Frost once did.
It does not matter what they bring of their bodies.
In the starlight, who is to say it is not really them
pushing through the grass, splashing like salmon.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Just this morning I put Tokyo Police Club's "Champ" on the record player, and I thought about Rudy. I thought about that winter, and I thought about how I saw him so briefly, and then never again. He's as much a ghost as any of the ones in the stories I heard as a kid. As are the boys that I used to know; some still with us, some long gone into the earth. There's a certain fossil quality to music, and film and tv. The resonance that it creates. The way it drags us back into the past. Puts us under a kind of hypnosis where we're engaging with it in real time but also it as a hyperobject, the many caked layers of its history within and around us. May we all continue to have people who hand us these fossils. Who play us good music. Who are willing to jump out of windows and ride recklessly through the night. May we keep them, if at a minimum, as a beautiful fossil.”
Eli Karren is a poet and educator from Vermont. Among other places, his work has been featured in swamp pink, At Length, and the Harvard Review. He currently resides in Durham, NC.
Seventeen
Eli Karren | Poetry, Fall 2026
No songs like the songs you heard at seventeen.
The ones smuggled off campus by an older sister,
a camp counselor, some Magi who’d appear
for holiday break bearing mixtapes
and USB drives. They who’d return home
sporting the tees of bands they’d seen
at Fallfest, at basement shows, emo bands
with horrible names and indie rockers
with teardrop tattoos. That winter
when I could first drive a car, I had Rudy
who appeared like a Dickensian ghost
in the dish pit alongside me, offering
the good word of Matador Records: of Pavement,
Cat Power, Boards of Canada, the Jon Spencer
Blues Explosion. No backroads like the backroads
I knew at seventeen. Haunted with overgrown maples.
Mist rising through the slats of the covered bridge.
Sometimes I still dream of idling
outside the houses of the boys I grew up with,
flicking my headlights and waiting for them to appear,
one leg then another, dangling and dropping
from a second story window. Sometimes they are gaseous.
Sometimes with bodies made of static. Still,
we are going to the quarry, to the reservoir, to smoke
and wander the trails that Frost once did.
It does not matter what they bring of their bodies.
In the starlight, who is to say it is not really them
pushing through the grass, splashing like salmon.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“Just this morning I put Tokyo Police Club's "Champ" on the record player, and I thought about Rudy. I thought about that winter, and I thought about how I saw him so briefly, and then never again. He's as much a ghost as any of the ones in the stories I heard as a kid. As are the boys that I used to know; some still with us, some long gone into the earth. There's a certain fossil quality to music, and film and tv. The resonance that it creates. The way it drags us back into the past. Puts us under a kind of hypnosis where we're engaging with it in real time but also it as a hyperobject, the many caked layers of its history within and around us. May we all continue to have people who hand us these fossils. Who play us good music. Who are willing to jump out of windows and ride recklessly through the night. May we keep them, if at a minimum, as a beautiful fossil.”
Eli Karren is a poet and educator from Vermont. Among other places, his work has been featured in swamp pink, At Length, and the Harvard Review. He currently resides in Durham, NC.