Reminders to Take my Medication
By: Celeste Schueler
One of my daughters gifts me
fragments of white shells found at
the rock beach of a tiny white
lighthouse,
these oceans rumble in the
throat of my mixed episodes,
fragments of reasonable and
emotion mind placed in glass jars
lids rippling against noise,
my mother says it skipped her,
this inheritance of mental illness
and tells me to watch my daughters,
heat rises in our home just south of
Seattle, another Air Force spouse asks
how I endured Mississippi summers
without central heat and air,
I am reminded of the tiny white house
planted next to sunflowers and trails of
Arkabutla where the first
suicidal ideations weaved with kudzu––
Daddy and me standing at 3 am
watching meteorites shatter darkness
and we gathered pecans listening to
the horses in the pasture,
I imagined my wrists mangled
by the barbed wire as the moods
swept across my fifteen-year-old
mind, placing clothes on the line––
No countryside was wide
enough for those invasive thoughts,
painted over teenage girl lips
whispering death,
twenty-one years later the moods
still gulf and ripple, the moods
swell but a cocktail of medications
seeps into the cracks
to river away the suicidal
ideations, each day
swimming in the mind’s
eyes, always searching for
the incurable.
These poems encompass a journey with bipolar disorder including psychiatric hospitalizations with a trigger warning for suicidal ideation. Taking elements from nature and staying true to the experience of living with a mental illness, these poems are a reflection of one young woman's journey. Celeste Maria Schueler is a poet and mother living in the Pacific Northwest. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her early 20s and originally from Mississippi, she has her BA in English and MFA in creative writing from Mississippi University for Women. Her first collection of poetry is forthcoming in spring 2026 from ELJ Editions. She loves baking bundt cakes, reading books, writing poetry and essays, and taking her twin daughters on adventures around Tacoma and Seattle, WA. You can find her on Twitter as CelestePoetProf and on Instagram as celeste.schueler.