iii. earth and ash

Rain Eternal as Kahlo by Bryce Sng (poetry)
Rojak & Borders by Rex Tan (poetry)
Sojourns by Stone by Karuna Kwok (creative nonfiction)
All the earth-bound things by Bevin Ng (poetry)

Rain Eternal as Kahlo by Bryce Sng

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been seeing rain

even when there’s none, zero, zilch, nada—my thoughts

pitter-patter like silky glitches as I keep the clothes,

shut the windows, hear the koels coo in delight

and I become that coo, mould myself into that delight,

I am at home in the alley of my breaths; I am out there

somewhere, with all the lives I can’t see. I hear the rain

that is not rain and feel the heat of the sun engulf me;

I pull the nocturnal sea over me and am underwater

in my bed. Then it does rain and the coo, the delight,

all vanish like thoughts do. I am a sunfish, a hydrangea,

a sand dollar, an ixora… I am walking on water to save

the last penguin in Antarctica. I am swapping bodies

with that guy who’s married to calisthenics and is now

hiking up Mt. Everest, then the girl in Mexico diligently

folding paper stars for her ailing mother, the thirteen boys

on their world tour, the one million ants in the gutter

that know to look at the stars even as their frail bodies

are washed away in the rain. It’s always raining somewhere

in this quivering world. When it’s not my thoughts, it’s

blood and bombs and food and the uncontainable grief

that one tries to catch with their hands or a pail

that is not quite a pail. I do not leave the sea.

Not before I catch myself raining

watermelon seeds till all versions

of the one Kahlo painting

are emptied of the seeds

that could speak.

Bryce Sng is currently an English undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University. He is also the administrative and publicity assistant for youth writing collective, sploosh! (Instagram: @sploosh_sg), and a member of the writing groups, The Saturday Poets and Caesura (Instagram: @caesura.col). He plays Pokémon rom hacks in his free time.

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Rojak & Borders by Rex Tan

Conglomerate rocks lie meditatively in the museum’s vitrine. Their unwieldy convexities jutting out, various clasts cemented incongruously. The edgeless pebbles tell of an obsolete past. Glaciers and torrents severing boulders, rivering broken clasts onto alien beds — war-displaced villagers, slaves and slavers voyaging to melancholy’s dawn. Who said cultures must be fine-grained, even, and homogenous?

ii.

Gilded calligraphy dancing on missionary school’s plaque, red lanterns hanging across saddled electricity poles, dragon-nested lamp posts lining the streets, jeepneys inching through cramped alleys, laughing buddha rubbing his belly in an overrated hopia shop, Binondo’s pagoda belfry mourning Lorenzo’s martyrdom, Christians offering joss sticks to the beribboned cross — thin curls of smoke arise from the Chinese bronze urn, falter mid-air, unsure which heaven to go.

iii.

Rojak uncle would mix up scissored taupok, diced pineapple, cubed jambu, julienne cucumber, cut you tiao, crushed peanuts, along with a generous ladle of belacan paste into his battered ochre bowl. The flavour of this chimeric salad explodes — sweet, savoury, crunchy, chewy — each ingredient complements another without the bitterness of cultural assimilation. The secret recipe of his motorbike food stall brought an unusual multiracial crowd to the easement of Malaysia’s oldest duzhong. And years later, rojak became my only persuasion for cultural integration, even though uncle is not there anymore.

iv.

“Our national culture is built from the lowest common denominators of all races, for example, no one can put up decorations that are too racial in HDB. But such vacuum also gives us freedom to create our identity”, I nodded to his words as my mind contrasted the island’s blanched slabs with the human-sized keris in my Malay neighbour’s courtyard. Night, my PR sister and I visited the supertrees in gardens by the bay — imposing metal structures conjuring dazzling laser lights accompanied by plasticky disney music — expensive corporate presentation. Yet, the angmo beside me seemed pleased.

Perchance one day we can shrug off our melanin, drain the oceans by two hundred metres to sunbathe in the archipelago’s trenches, sew together the ragged isles of Sundaland, and maybe, rubbish those nonsensical boundaries demarcated by white men. Likely this day will not arrive and we shall concede that life thrives on dichotomy and forging enemies. Unless, one fine day we swim across the seas of our thousand islands, and learn all it takes to be a minority is crossing a body of troubled waters.

Rex Tan is a journalist by trade and a poet at heart. As a Malaysian, he is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Malay, yet calls none his first language.

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Sojourns by Stone by Karuna Kwok

The poet, William Blake, described me perfectly in the line, “To see the world in a grain of sand.”

Throughout history, I have mostly been seen as a platform, a foundation, or a literal stepping stone for larger architectural constructions – cottages, brick and mortar houses, and grandiose buildings with curlicued appendages.

No one sees me as an eye, a witness, a record and recorder of history; how I forge, combine, transmute and alchemize with others to form – well, almost everything you see.

To see the world in me? Pulverize me, and you will get millions of grains of sand.

It is easy to forget our origins. Over millennia, my kin(d) and I have been recycled, forcefully forged together, and painted over to beautify exteriors. We have forgotten who we are. People forget all the time. They take us for granted, thinking that we are just what we are – stone, rock. It is a paradox that we are limited in the ways we can be used, yet infinite in quantity.

I have been condemned when through no fault of mine, we were chipped, hacked away at and eventually collapsed when we became too fragile to hold structures together. It is no coincidence that the end of something is signified by the term “bite the dust”, because those poor blighters literally swallowed dust and died when buildings collapsed.

So you see, I witness and carry a history, many histories. I have seen deaths, cruelty, suffering and hardship. I am the most reliable witness because of my sworn fealty of silence, immortalized in another idiom – “if walls could talk”.

I have travelled the world and have history buried beneath my depths, but my story has never been told. It is another paradox that something that has been through fire, floods, and droughts is voiceless. That we who outlive a human life are not cherished, but sold and bought like commodities.

This is how I have sojourned. I have been forged by fire, water, and friction into what I am today. My journey is an invisible one made stronger by being unseen – made stronger and sadder by separation from my fellow stone elements.

If you could read us as Blake did, who saw us as precious stardust containing the history of galaxies and universes, you would see that our journey is that of an amanuensis. We have been written over infinite times; we are an over-written palimpsest that can never be destroyed.

In no particular order, Karuna Kwok is an English Literature graduate, childhood educator, weaver of crystal jewellery, observer and lifelong student of humanity. Writing is her way of sharing “haecceity” (the unique essence we all have), which she believes makes up and enriches this world with magic, beauty and wonder.

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All the earth-bound things by Bevin Ng

Is it any wonder that we

cry, the moment we are born

to prove that we are alive, to

wail at the shock of it all

Last time I heard someone

wail like that I could only

offer a weak wreath, a ring

of thorns and leaves

They wilt, wither and wrinkle

so quietly.

Here in the dusty present

the smell of smoke, burnt offerings

small attempts to reach across space

Bevin is an artist and an arts administrator. She studied Theatre at SOTA, and History of Art at UCL. She writes a newsletter at walkingdog.substack.com.

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iv. other worlds