Poets in Port, April 25, 2008

Poets in Port will feature Gladys Henderson at 7:30 pm on Friday, April 25, 2008 at Caffé Portofino, 249 Main St., Northport, opposite the theatre. There will also be an Open Reading — the audience is encouraged to bring their poems and participate. For more information, contact Steven Schmidt.

Gladys Henderson runs poetry workshops for Live Poets, based in Islip and the Poets Circle at the Graphic Eye Art Gallery in Port Washington and co-hosts a poetry reading venue at the Cool Beanz coffee house in Saint James, New York.

An award winning poet, in 2004 she was awarded first prize in the Live Poets, Mid-Island Y JCC, and Ronkonkoma Productions poetry competitions. In 2005 she won first place in the Farmingdale Poetry Group and Performance Poetry contests. For the year 2006, she received first place in the Ronkonkoma Productions competition and was a finalist for the Paumanok Poetry Award 2006.

Gladys Henderson’s poems have been published in: For Loving Precious Beast, Kaleidoscope, Long Island Dreams, Long Island Sounds, Lyrismos, Midwestern University Quarterly, Oberon, Performance Poets Anthologies, Robert Frost Participant Anthologies and The Light of City and Sea. In addition for fall 2007, her poems were selected to appear in Songs of Seasoned Women, PAUMANOK: Poetry and Pictures of Long Island, and Primal Sanities. Her chapbook, Eclipse of Heaven, has been selected for publication by Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky and will be released in April 2008. It can be ordered here

She can be seen reading at Poetry VLog.

A Nine Year Old Prepares Dinner

You have been alone,
in the kitchen below the lights
kept dim, and sliced your finger
cutting raw onions for dinner
while they argued
and wrangled and never
saw that finger, although
you showed it to them twice —
the cut so deep you couldn’t
stop its bleeding, found
scrap sheets in the bottom
of the closet, ripped them
with your mouth and free hand,
like a soldier in a war movie,
and wrapped the wound,
until the top grew white
as though nothing had happened —
and went back to cooking
the dinner, the one you would
eat in silence, your finger throbbing
on the table, their leftover words
breaking  the quiet, your blood
seeping through the bandage,
while your father, the first aider,
mumbled under his sherried lips.
You have been alone, invisible,
danced for them a thousand
times. In the morning the blood
flow stopped and your mother
asked to take a glance.  It was a gash
that looked mean, reeked of onions.
She recoiled, turned away and went
on outside to feed the quail.