Nikita Nelin

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Nikita Nelin was born in Moscow, Russia and immigrated to the U.S in 1989. He has lived in Austria and Italy, and has traveled the U.S extensively. He received the Sean O’Faolain prize for short fiction, the Summer Literary Seminars prize for nonfiction, and the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction, as well as being chosen as a finalist for the Restless Books Immigrant prize and the Dzanc Books prize. His work has been published in print and online. Nikita has conducted research through the Harriman Institute as well as translation through Yale Press, and has written on the convergence between fringe and at-large cultural trends for the Hannah Arendt Center. He holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, is a 2019 Associate Fellow at The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, and is a member of the Southern Experience Collective.

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04/20/20 How Do You Want to Travel

May 04, 2020 / Nikita Nelin

It is easier to be a scavenger

than a pin on an unfinished map.

But I like hard things –

they too are a voyage.

So,

I’ve signed up,

voted,

planted a garden,

left a bag or two on a side.

Sometimes,

I feel like I almost know

whose wrong

and whose right;

I was told this a perk of membership,

the sweet methadone

of righteous grit.

And yet still

I fumble in my hands any shape

that pretends certainty.

You see,

I still don’t know what I think until

I write

it all,

however dangerous the presumptions of such wandering.

I make little wind up dolls.

I never know where they’re gonna go.

it’s like,

they all deserve to travel by the assumption of freedom,

otherwise what’s the point of making a map at all?

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