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The Triumphator Adding Machine
The Triumphator Adding Machine
The brass lip of the console
gleams right down to the rubber pads.
The sliding parts grind their teeth,
but all they multiply is dust:
turn the handle -
in her eye a snowstorm of zeros.
Her primadonna caprices,
star of the first five-year-plan
on the director’s desk.
Her emigrée’s bile,
exile to the wages office,
a free-market antique.
What shall we do with her now?
Send her back where she came from,
to the airless closet in the attic . . .
Where the red-haired lady from accounts
calculates the leadership’s bonuses
happy as a young Engels.
Translated by Agata Miksa and David Malcolm