Issue Three

When we began Aporia, we made a quiet promise: to read everything that arrived with real attention, and to say yes whenever something told the truth. We did not yet know how far that promise would carry us. Issue Three arrives with work from six countries — India, Brazil, Pakistan, China, the Philippines, and the United States — and in two languages, English and Hindi. Six genres sit side by side in these pages: a haiku beside a Greek myth retold, a Hindi poem beside a piece of flash fiction, personal essays beside creative non-fiction.

But the map is not what moves us most. The depth is.

Consider the range in these pieces. From China, Viviane Chen writes of inherited silence — a grandmother who “laughed with her mouth shut.” From India, in Hindi, Eknoorjeet Kaur opens on the ache of a promise unkept: “आए नहीं, जिनके थे वादे” — in her own translation, they never came, the ones who had made promises. Aaranya Rakhunde finds grief in a kitchen habit: “two plates out of habit. one set slightly to the left.” And Aahana Singh throws the door open to anyone who has ever felt too much, welcoming them to “the club of the tortured poets.”

These are not pieces written to be liked. They are pieces someone needed to write — and we are honoured they trusted us to hold them. Some of these writers had never submitted anywhere before. Every one of them did something only they could do.

If you are reading this and wondering whether your own voice belongs here: it does. Aporia exists for exactly the writer who is not sure yet — the one with a poem in a drawer, a story half-finished, a language that crosses borders. Send us the thing you cannot not write. We are still reading everything. We are still saying yes.

— Aporia Editorial Team