Alice Miller

The Lever

Language: english

Translations: german (Der Hebel)

The Lever

I spend hours as a gambler shovels coins
in whatever currency we keep

letting all our hours sleep
in the unbreakable brains of our machines.

When I pull the lever I know the lever.

I know each second before each second knows
me, but while I think this doubles me

I’m halved. When I pull
the lever I know the lever

pulls me; so I say the lever
has to do with love; because I want

to know you but know your being
makes me half-sad you’re wholly here,

half-happy. I’m here to collect matter
that will let us build a new life. Still;

as the advertisements know,
there’s nothing to it.

I ask for one more day, and it comes.

Alice Miller

photo © private

* 08.12.1982, Wellington, New Zealand
lives in: Wien, Austria

Alice Miller is a writer from New Zealand living in Berlin and Vienna. She is the author of The Limits (Shearsman & Auckland University Press), and the forthcoming Nowhere Nearer (Liverpool University Press & Auckland University Press). She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters. Alice’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Oxford Poetry, BBC Travel, Poetry London, Landfall, The Rialto, and The American Scholar. She has received the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award, the Royal Society of NZ Manhire Prize, a Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship, and has travelled to Antarctica courtesy of Antarctica NZ. She has also been a resident at the Michael King Centre, Massey University, the Grimshaw Sargeson Centre, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Blaue Stunde, an edition of her poems with a German translation, was published by Edition Solitude.

photo © private

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