Editor’s Choice

Philip Nikolayev 

 

Let’s Be More Careful

 

Washing a handful of discount blueberries
in my hand, I thought I was being
competently careful, but dropped one,
and it got squished. Thank God
it’s a mere blueberry, thought I,
it could have been
a person,
a neighborhood,
a village,
or worse.

 

Practice of Being Fine

 

Bright coins of rain tap out a song
on the thin roof of the afternoon.
You stand there, practicing being fine,
as if it were a language to learn.
The world keeps staging plain marvels,
charges only your breath for admission.
A bus exhales. A window warms.
Someone laughs like it’s still allowed.
You think of what you’ve lost
and how politely it stays lost,
never returning your calls. Even so,
a worm surprised by daylight inches
across the sidewalk, serious, alive.
You don’t get your old life back,
you only get this one, held together
by brave stitches of light along
the imperfect seam under your ribs.

 

The Mercy of Errors

 

You misread the email and stay home that evening.
The train you meant to catch leaves in a hurry without you.
You hear the insult wrong and answer with a shrug instead of fire.
You take the wrong street, find a bakery, brightly lit at closing.
The baker hands you fine bread he cannot sell and says take, take.
Your phone dies before you dispatch the brutally honest reply.
By morning your anger has lost its passport.
You drop the last digit in the number and never reach that door.
The catastrophe that waited there remains unemployed.
Is there still time? You hear your bus depart like a verdict.
In the silence that follows, your breath returns to you by and by.
No one will ever prove that these were deletions by an invisible hand.
Yet some nights, counting errors like mismatched socks, you feel watched over.
Whether by a plan or by a certain clumsy tenderness in things.
As if the world kept tripping on purpose so you might keep walking.

 

Hope You Are Well

 

Creatures of the pursuit of happiness
that we demonstrably are, we wish it
upon others and ourselves alike,
endlessly.

 

On the train, faces glow in small blue light,
each a private dusk — eyes fixed, lips tight,
thumbs scrolling through loss and chaos
no one speaks of.

 

That woman looks down too long,
this man’s screen reflects no one waiting.
Our silence hums in the rails, fatigue
gathering like mist.

 

“Hope you are well,” I type phonily
into the phone, or, “I hope all is well
with you,” knowing too well there isn’t
any such hope.

 

Cold Showers

 

Again.
A new bathroom.
A new logic.

 

You stand there, polite and naked,
as if manners mattered to plumbing.
The handle is a riddle posed in chrome.
Left promises warmth, right offers authority.
Neither delivers.

 

You try the obvious first.
Then the less obvious.
Then the ritual:
half turn, pause, half turn back,
like negotiating with a deity
who only answers in temperature.

 

Somewhere, hot water exists.
You can feel it
in the pipes’ throat-clearing,
in the brief, smug burst
that touches your shoulder
and vanishes.

 

You pretend you meant this,
this bracing philosophy,
this cold baptism in the hotel
or in a strange home,
because calling to ask would mean
admitting the world has knobs
you never learned to read.
You wait. You adjust. You wait again.

 

Adulthood, you think,
is the practiced face of ease
worn over not-knowing;
the patience to stand inside confusion
without calling it fate,
to keep turning the same small truth
a fraction at a time,
hoping warmth is real,
and not just a rumor
in the pipes.

 

Philip Nikolayev is a multilingual poet living in Boston. He holds two academic degrees from Harvard and a PhD from Boston University. Nikolayev’s poetic works are published in periodicals internationally. His collections include Monkey Time (winner of the Verse Prize) and Letters from Aldenderry. A volume of his translations of Alexander Pushkin’s poetry, The Star of Dazzling Ecstasy, was published by Tiptop Street in 2021. He coedited, with Anna Halberstadt, Lyric Resistance: Ukrainian Poetry of War and Hope, the summer 2024 issue of The Café Review. Nikolayev is coeditor-in-chief of Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics. His collection of poems in Spanish translation, Falso insomnio, has just been published in Latin America by Editorial Efimera.