Veronica Carlos-Landa

Romance English

I see my face in yours—

How Spanish comes from Latin

In Spanish, the plural defaults to masculine unless all female. Of six children, there is one boy. Son los hijos del Senor? Majority doesn’t rule. Gender does. One’s greatest achievement is to be born male. The next best thing, if so unfortunate, is to be beautiful.

Jenny Drai

from DARK AGE

Sophie’s writing about Siggo eating a plum.  He’s still in that fifth century so maybe just some apples from an arbor but hear her out.

The plum is sweetly fragrant.  Flavors swell and burst until he lives against his tongue.  Now she can get his sentence out.  I ought to tell you where you’re from he tells the pit he throws into the wind.

Where you’re going.

Siggo thinks in the orchard.

Sarah Garrigan

The Melancholy of Departure

He said, maps leave.

In the Tate that day, I felt them expand

with latitude lines that did not connect,

more fragile than the lattice of a leaf.

It was all about perspective.

On a postcard sent back several thousand miles,

I wrote, “This is just a more pretentious form of missing.”

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

BACK ROOM LIVE ! SATURDAY NIGHT ! January 31st 2008

! SARAH GARRIGAN ! VERONICA CARLOS-LANDA! JENNY DRAI ! 7pm !  Join us for our debut posting!

Coming soon backroomlive.blogspot.com a photo archive of the Back Room Live reading series from Mc Nally’s Irish Pub in Oakland. Also, Thursday January 8th join us live at Book Zoo in Oakland at 7pm w/BRL Editors Choice Edition/ contributors ! Brenda Hillman ! Sara Mumolo ! Barbara Claire Freeman ! Craig Santos Perez ! Hope to see you +V.

Jenny Drai likes to say she was raised by wolves, but really she is the child of librarians, which may or may not be the same thing.  A graduate of the poetry program at Saint Mary’s College of California, her work has appeared in Court Green, Five Fingers Review, and The Tiny as well as other journals.  She has written a novel, John Clare, which awaits publication, and is currently working on a novella, Dark Age, about a fifth century book of laws, a list of names, and a divorced writer with too much time on her hands.  She likes to swim and run and enjoy scotch in a responsible fashion in Oakland, California, but she has also lived in Chicago, Hamburg, and Munich. She works in the home furnishings industry.

Veronica Carlos-Landa is a Mexican-American poet who has lived in California all of her life and never plans to leave. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from St. Mary’s College. Vero, as her friends affectionately call her, also teaches, learns, loves, sews, knits, and loves to drink beer.

Sarah Garrigan is a student at the University of California at Berkeley working towards a degree in English. She is currently a Co-Publicity Chair for the Berkeley Poetry Review. After college, she looks forward to living in a box while discovering what exactly one can do with a B.A. in English. She enjoys drinking chai lattes, wandering around San Francisco, and pretending to work on her senior thesis.