Tuscaloosa Bypass, A New Chapbook by Poet Cecele Kraus

Note to readers: Tuscaloosa Bypass, a new chapbook by poet Cecele Kraus, will be published by Finishing Line Press in February, 2012. To order your copy, go to the chapbook's order site.These fabulous poems would make a wonderful holiday gift!!

By Cecele Kraus

"Three Sisters"

Labor was long and hard. The doctors
kindly gave my mother two anesthesias,
bringing a lack of oxygen and a damaged baby.

Anna was born in late June, but my world turned to winter
as my mother drifted, and night fell bleak
on our circumstances.

Four o’clock flowers trumpeted around our porch
in late afternoons. I sang, we are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
played in the yard, watched the red flowers twist

and flutter into night-blooms, then ravel their petals
in the dewy morning hours. I sang, every rung goes higher,
higher, pushed myself up into the air.

Now Anna visits in a dream, giggling, and tells me
of her boyfriend at the sheltered workshop. My sister
Amelia returns too—her eyes pierce as she wards off danger.

Older sister, I dream a sod carpet, pull it back,
and find gorgeous flowers, roots entangled in pachysandra,
closing in light, opening in the turf’s dark.

Oh trinity of sisters. Anna, small bud blooming in
her own light, Amelia, wild orchid in a desert, and me,
stooped gardener, seeking flowers wherever I can find them.


After thirty years in private practice as a psychoanalyst, Cecele Kraus found herself writing poetry. Writing provided perspective and poetry became a way of life. Her work has appeared in Windfall, Naugatuck River Review, Passager, Backstreet, Chronogram, MyStoryLives, and two chapbook anthologies--Java Wednesdays and Zephyrs 2. Peace Corps experiences were the inspiration for a chapbook entitled Dreaming Barranquilla. In 2009, her poem, “Love Blooms,” won first place in the Hudson Valley Writers Guild poetry contest. She lives in Copake, New York. This poem appeared first in the Fall, 2009 issue of "Java Wednesdays, as “Longest Day of the Year."