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.
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