PROJECT GRACE-UP
NATIONAL LGBTQ+
WRITERS WORKSHOP
King Llanza
King Llanza is a 22-year-old writer from Lucena City, Quezon Province. He previously worked as a pollution control officer of an auto dealership. Currently living in Manila, he is taking his MS Environmental Science and Ecosystem Management degree as a full-time student at De La Salle University-Manila. Some of his poems have been published in Anak Sastra, an online literary magazine based in Malaysia. King is into tarot reading and making carbonara for dinner every other night of each week.
Featured Work:
The Observer’s Diary
Where I'm From
The place, with its sleeping vines
slithering like treadmills
racing to exhaustion,
is a flat-lined breath
running on steady sparks.
The place has water,
an artificial basin
for a natural stream
from uphill. It sleeps
to wake in witching hours.
The place has puddles
birthed by ceilings
and the floor has no choice
but to accept with
its infinite palms.
The place has a bed
watered by a young body,
wakes up in some mornings
flourishing in shame and scolding.
The place is
two jeepney rides
away from a pool.
The place is the ocean’s
fate from centuries
of gravel and concrete,
to mean a part of the saltwater
sways tasteless and warm
and the earth that structures
a home is the place that crumbles
in what seeps between
the pores of the solid world