Editor's Preface

Cover image: Flying Foxes, Singapore, 2021 © Robert Zhao Renhui

This issue celebrates life. 

This issue celebrates love.

This issue celebrates joy. 

This issue celebrates and sings of the light that continues to shine on endlessly, even after death. This issue celebrates the infinity of time, of love as bending time. This issue chooses to celebrate death as a transition from the physical into the spiritual, as a carrying on rather than an ending of. 

Some time after her crossing, Ealga gifted me this message: Strength of heart, from Woodlock’s “Forever Ago”. This message sustains and nourishes me, and offers me comfort whenever I fall back into the quagmire of grief. And grief exists and abounds in so many ways while we live out our time on Earth. 

Short fiction anchors this issue, which was surprising to me as our previous issues have always been anchored by poetry. Each of the five pieces are memorable in their own ways, and serve as gates into refreshing and sometimes heart wrenching ways of remembering, seeing and being on Earth. 

The issue opens with Jessica Bryant Klagmann’s “A Rift is a Monument”, where the earth opens up for the weary narrator who journeys inwards and upwards into healing, so as to “mov[e] across that vast wilderness” of her being in newly empowered ways. Francisco Palemón Arcos’ “Yolatsin ipan nokalpan” (“The Feelings of the Water in My Community”) offers readers a new way of understanding water’s feelings, as wanting to live freely and give to others “to sweeten their joy”. David Denny’s “Tralanis” is a sensitive inquiry into multispecies entanglements that pose uneasy questions about sense, place and belonging, the boundaries between rural and urban, self and other, and of imbibing grief, pain and loss as part of being human, while nurturing the equally vital aspect of openness and curiosity in honouring the healing process and cycles of life. 

Rammel Chan’s “Birds of the North” serves as an allegory of what selfishness and greed can do to damage our earth, told through the story of the last birds of the north who are poached into extinction. In the face of violence, horror and impending extinction, familial love is the last gift exchanged between the living. The issue closes with “Growing up in the Garden/City” by Faith Ho, who responds to a personal essay of mine, “The Field”. Faith ruminates on the “blurred impressions of trees, grass, crickets, sandy paths, waves, sunlight filtered through leaves”, of the self as apart from yet a part of the natural world that exists in spite of her. The image we are left with is one of “fragmented memories of various shades of green”, of the sounds of birds who continue their “incessant chirping”, unaware or perhaps aware of but unbothered by the human presence: “they continue to sing”. 

Esther Vincent Xueming

The Tiger Moth Review