Please Join Us Sunday, May 18 at Symposium Books

Hope you can join us at the Origami Poems Project "Meet the Authors" event at Symposium books on Sunday May 18th from 2:00 - 5:00.  I will be reading with silent lotus. The event will also feature music, refreshments and an open mic, so bring your own poem to read! For more information, click on the link below.

May 18th - OPP Meet The Authors Event

Order my Poetry Collection, No Longer Always

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=1222

POEM: "I am Twenty-Four," by Diane Dolphin

I am Twenty-Four,

buckled into an airplane seat, tangible consequence

of that drunken night a month ago at Leo’s bar

where I’d bragged about backpacking foreign cities

and shores with my camera and notebook.

Dublin’s my first destination, I slurred; it came out destiny.

So you always say — when? asked Laurel, her friends —

my new friends — egging me on.

She walked me to the gate and kissed me.

            Revving engines; I brace for G-force, the lift,

                                                lurch and tumble of turbulence.

The woman beside me in blue boiled wool — my mother’s age,

had she lived — looks up, smiles vaguely,

turns her page.

The flight attendant drags out the drink cart, a sign of faith

that this tonnage will not plummet, that somehow

the currents will sustain us. I wash down a seasickness pill

with Jamesons and ginger ale,

drift on the honey scent of Laurel’s hair, aware of how

her eyes mirror the cyan sea ranging

boundlessly beneath me.

Copyright (c) 2014 Diane Dolphin. "I am Twenty-Four," was published in the Naugatuck River Review (Winter, 2014), and was a Semi-Finalist in the Naugatuck River Review 2013 poetry competition.

Hope Street: Nine New England Poets on Love & Loss

I'm so pleased to be included in this anthology, in good company with all these other fine poets from The Loft, including Bea Lazarus, Jim Cronin, Karen Haskell, Joan Fishbein, Maureen Lapre, Michael Crowley, Nancy Brown and Sandra Moran.

The anthology includes my poems, "The Worst Dream," "Mirage" and "Tenderness." You can order copies today by clicking on the link below:

Hope Street, available through Main Street Rag

Reading for "Up Do" book launch at Books on The Square in Providence

"Night Shift" A Poem by Diane Dolphin

Night Shift

Diane Dolphin

In the dead of sleep she wanders

down into the basement of her mind.

She sifts through clutter, sorting papers,

unpacking and repacking keepsakes,

shifting piles from one corner to another.

She sits on a crate, poring through albums

of photos, torn clippings of conversations,

late night whispers saved on scraps of linen,

detailed notes from old arguments.

She replays home movies, losing herself

inside them. Sometimes, the slant of sun and shadow

in the garden, the feel of his voice wrapped around

her name, the smell of Sunday coffee and eggs

fill her with light and she rises

through the worn floors into the perfect black sky,

the stars sharp as shattered glass. But as night gives way

to pre-dawn gray, as her bedroom walls indiscernibly shift

from gray to lilac, as rose and violet seep into the flowers

on her quilt, green into the leaves and the silk robe laid over

the chair, blue into the irises of her eyes, now open,

still in her mind, she is circling, circling above

the detritus, searching for a place to land.

"Night Shift" was first exhibited & published in Poetry & Art, Exhibit & Book, Wickford Art Association, 2013. 

(c) 2013 Diane Dolphin. All Rights Reserved.

Wickford Art Association's Poetry & Art Exhibit

Hi, folks,

Check out the Wickford Art Association's Poetry & Art Exhibit at their gallery in Wickford, RI.  They've got a great show where they selected poems and then had visual artists create art work in response to the poems. Talk about a meeting of the left and right brains! The reception on Aug. 9th and the poetry reading last night were magical. 

My poem, "Night Shift," is included in the exhibit, as was a graphic piece by Amy Schupler Venear in response to my poem. You can also purchase a fabulous exhibit book featuring all the  poems and artwork from in the show, and proceed will go to the RI Community Foodbank. The exhibit closes on Aug. 25th!