Issue Five

Five issues in, the promise we started with has not changed: read everything that arrives with real attention, and say yes whenever a piece tells the truth. What has changed is how far that truth now travels to reach us. Issue Five gathers ten writers from eight countries — India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States — and with them, for the first time, Aporia carries voices from North Africa and the Arab world alongside the ones who have long filled these pages.

It is our widest map yet. But as always, the map is not the thing that moves us. The small, exact, unrepeatable things on it are.

Consider how many of these pieces refuse the comfort of an easy ending. From Morocco, Radouane Arayb writes a letter mourning a friend who died a migrant, reduced by the records to an "Unclaimed Body," and insists on returning him his name. From Pakistan, Muhammad Abdullah Mumtaz remembers a Saturday that never reached the amusement park it was promised, and the mother learning to hide the pieces. From India, Jay Samanta sets a Jatra actor's private life against a town deciding what it will permit, and lets the ending stay open — because the town has not decided either.

And consider how the truest writing here trusts a single image to carry everything. Aaranya Rakhunde serves a lie warm, in a bowl a mother insists you finish. Sophia Jamali Soufi, in Persian and English both, finds refuge from "the assault of the world" in one other person. Esraa Al-Gawhari, writing from Baghdad in Arabic and English, watches roses drink the moon's reflection until its silver "lives, petal-deep in each one." Anna Orlandi listens to a clock that keeps ticking through a life; Emma Farmer writes of being trained to leave. And the founder's own poem, "Hostile Takeover," turns its gaze on the quiet machinery that sells us the hole our lives are shaped to fill.

Ten pieces, four of them essays, four of them poems, two of them fiction; several in more than one language, laid side by side so the original is never lost. What they share is not a theme. It is a way of paying attention — the willingness to stay with the small true thing until it opens. That is the only map we have ever really been drawing.