five poems

by Celeste Schueler

My Own Mind Haunts Me

  “I lay my ear to furious Latin.” ­–Sylvia Plath

Lavender is eulogy for the bees,

Wedding veil in a spider’s clutches,

Hive in my mind with bleeding bee box,

A splitting of Latuda and stirring the pot of chicken and dumplings,

Domesticity like the dead cardinal,

Missing head and red feathers,

An animal sacrifice to my hallucinations.

The mimosa tree survives the ice storm,

Naked pink blooms in Oklahoma heat,

A haunting of psychosis as I sit in the coffeeshop,

A sobbing of the spotted rabbit with broken legs.

A web of triggers like orange flowers glowing in mania,

And a singe of sleep,

The bee box humming for twenty-one years.

At a Reading in Tacoma, WA, Another Poet Tells Me She Listens Past My Southern Accent

and says what I’m saying is

            important

and a librarian thanks me for sharing poems about

            mental health––

and this summer will be fifteen years since I was

photographing St. Cecilia’s in Friars Point, Mississippi,

the evergreen roof against blue sky and

Daddy has renounced religion and

I forget to light the Advent candles,

but my mental illness requires a

devotion in the sacraments of pills

and hallowed texts washing the brain

and the holiness of Latuda has the

generosity of becoming generic and

insurance coverage ringing like

gold bells and white ovals and circles and

half-moons enlightening the neurodiversity

at bedtime and the peonies will bloom

maroon in the late Easter––

A Quote from Writer Snowden Wright Reminds Me of Living in Eudora, MS

Beginning at a dead-end road,

            I read that sunflowers clean

                        toxins from soil,

Faces turning toward mine,

            the black horse bites my

                        neck, a reminder of wilderness

Against my back, a suicidal

            ideation rippling in Arkabutla Lake

                        as I slip into the saddle,

Leather reins settling in my hands,

            emotions sinking with each

                        hoof and the midnights

Vibrating in my throat as I

            find consolation in message

                        boards and Alanis Morissette CDs,

My reflection in a large horse eye

            and moods ripening as I turn fifteen,

                        crawling between barbed wire

To cry into his soft neck,

            depressive episodes as a girth

                        across my brain and belly,

The dog brings a dead

            baby rabbit onto the white

                        porch, filling a journal

With engulfing moods

            in the summer heat while

                        the sun shadows vultures

Among the atmosphere.

Quantum Physics

“and when I am/transfigured, no longer                    human,” ––Sara Eliza Johnson

Silence as the scalpel                          fluorescent sun glitters 

                        across scissortail feathers                   lengthening needle punctures,

they gulf                                              my organs into butterfly dust             the spreading of vocal

                        chords into plastic chambers              flesh unfurls to reveal                         eclipsed eyes

the ooze of umbilical lives                  and my skin pines                               as a glued mosaic

wires lick my              hands as fracturing                  moon mounds             swollen plains,

machines purr oxygen                         into infancy lying                    in my arms

                        and echoes crawl                                 between our faces,                  my heart

fasts to their                            breath              I am cedar                   burning into

            nucleus,                                   a vagabond settling                             into trovants

and the fossilized                    quartz glowing            for their emotion                     minds.

Nebula

Growing in her eye,

Eyelash on her cheek,

Bone gnawed by

Loneliness as a shepherd

In Oklahoma dust, redness

Filtering through screens

Opening for diamond feathers

Grey as a tornado

Jutting above our roof,

Genetic deposition blossoms

Brick and mortar, premature

Cries under glass jars,

Hydrangea burning, dancing

Cardinals to lullaby swaying

Under wired moon

Swells of earth, waves of

Skin shaking in birth

Hollowing river, a shallow

Porcelain dish cracking

Under fists, soft skull

In sling, machines opening

Mouths, gloved hands cutting

Umbilical cords, cloned

Breaths in raw boxes,

Caged steam with needles,

Dark eyed starlings murmuring

Under backroad light.

Photo of Celeste Schueler

BIO: Celeste Schueler is a poet and twin mother from Mississippi. She has her BA in English and MFA in creative writing from Mississippi University for Women. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Her first poetry collection is forthcoming in 2027 from Unsolicited Press.