Issue Four

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. Issue Four carries that promise further across the world than any issue before it. Ten writers, seven countries — China, Serbia, Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, India, and the United States — and work that moves from poetry to personal essay to short fiction to haiku. It is the widest map we have yet drawn.

But the map is never what moves us most. The small true things on it are.

Consider the range. From China, Yufei Ran gives a heron a voice that answers every question with another ripple: “I don’t have any feathers left to spare.” From Argentina, Zoe Abril Gauna writes in Spanish of things “born of dream,” spores the ink abandons. From Pakistan, Umer Ali watches a classroom clock move “with the speed of a dying star.” And from India, Amruta Mone turns the loss of a small companion into a poem that never once says the word for grief — only “I turned eighteen. You remained five.”

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