Experience, a Duplex[1]

How do we capture experience?

Trap words in a jar and seal it tight?

Words trapped in a jar and sealed up tight

are muzzled, silenced and never heard.

I don’t want to be silent, not heard.

Let my shouts echo across canyons.

Sounds – even whispers – echo canyons.

The message can alter the landscape.

Now we witness the altered landscape.

What we once knew no longer applies.

The world before no longer applies.

The clocks have all melted – time is merged.

The clocks have all melted – we emerge.

We’ve been captured by experience.

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[1] Created by Jericho Brown, the duplex combines the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. It is 14 lines, arranged in couplets in which the first line of the couplet repeats words and phrases from the previous line. For the last couplet, the last line repeats the very first line.

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Jennifer Dotson’s debut collection, Clever Gretel, received the first Journal of Modern Poetry Book Award and was published by Chicago Poetry Press in 2013. Her

second poetry collection, Late Night Talk Show Fantasy & Other Poems, was published by Kelsay Books in 2020.  She is the founder and program coordinator for www.HighlandParkPoetry.org.