1 poem

READING CAMUS

I imagine Sisyphus tolerated

the intimacy of stone

& calloused hands

as much as he tried 

to call a truce with gravity.

Tedium exists within time, he knew,

& eternity existed first.

I teach, which is not real work 

like fixing Toyota engines

or baking cranberry scones.

Or the work of the punished tyrant

about to crest his hill 

when his feet slide back 

on the loose gravel. 

Everybody knows 

what doesn’t happen next 

& what does. 

Yet in life’s elliptical orbit around death,

some force pulls us sideways.

Wheels screech around a curve.

Streets are too narrow. 

If three o’clock is too early 

for a glass of merlot, 

then it’s too late for another coffee

(& the scones are sold out anyhow), 

an incomplete hypothetical

formed while driving home from work

in a dinosaur-powered Camry 

whose engine might crap out tomorrow.

I’m not getting smarter

from reading Camus,

but I’m less anxious about nothing.

Last year at the theater,

Macduff gloriously raised up

Macbeth’s severed mannikin-head 

covered in ketchup

& I laughed through my fingers,

a little sorry for my involuntary rudeness,

but not for admitting the absurdity

of it all,

all of us

with our asses

in burgundy velvet chairs

watching fate win.

Kristina Hakanson lives in Arizona where she teaches American rhetoric and poetry. Recent poems of hers have appeared in Connecticut River Review and Basin Bards: 44 Klamath Poets. Her chapbook, The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah, was published in 2022 by Finishing Line Press.