Found the issue, it's with how my system is set up.
I'm running the ark-stack docker container, but I'm also running EQ in a VM. That means in my eqemu_config.json, I needed to make these two equal:
"localaddress": "192.168.x.y",
"address": "192.168.x.y",
Normally localaddress 127.0.0.1 since you'll play on the same machine you host on, but by using a VM to play I'm effectively running the eqemu server on a separate machine.
I hate to say how many hours I spent working this out. Thanks to this thread for pointing me in the right direction.
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=43408