Mississippi Rebirth

Poems by Celeste Schueler and Paintings by Victoria Meek

Right on the Flowers, 2023

That Mississippi Hospitalization in 2009
 
Shame rises like
the heat of
Birds.
 
First Good Friday
I am always
Hospitalized in the Spring. 
 
Metal mirrors drilled into
the wall. 
Bible verses play over the
Intercom in this Baptist 
Behavioral Health Center. 
 
Circled in group therapy 
We watch a short video 
on Depression.
A man with a long white beard
brags about smoking pot and 
screwing an eighteen-year-old.
I hide behind my hair.
 
We walk outside into 
Sun and the social worker 
says You look pretty with your 
makeup as I tried to maintain 
any sense of my spirit.
 
I tell the psychiatrist 
It is like birds
Inside me. 
 
He scribbles on his pad 
Then rushes me away. 
 
Again, I swallow feathers
Filling crevices of 
My mind—
filing away the hallucinations. 

Camellias, Dec. 2020

Mississippi Rebirth
 
There is a history of
Mental illness in the family.
 
Spirits displaced and
Howls swept under the rug.
 
I have been on medications since
I was nineteen years old.
 
Handheld serotonin and a
hive of bees.
 
So many pills swallowed and
Rinsed down the drain.
 
Mississippi kudzu creeps
Into my brain.
Man Made herb like
my tiny white pills.
 
Blue bird, Stellar Jay
outside my window leaning into
the dead roses.
 
My own starched resurrection at
Easter as I was released.

Paperwhites, Dec. 2020

I Never Saw the Levee Again
 
Virgin Mary outside of Cutrer Mansion
Where the nun washed
my mouth out with soap.
The poison seeped into my gums
down into my belly.
 
Easter egg hunts in the field of
St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church;
I cut my own hair.
 
Visiting the downtown library
of the Delta; walks with Grandmother
around Friars Point in the blossoming sun.
 
A wire around my mouth
like a bit in the horse’s teeth
I pull the reins, but she does not stop.
 
I am falling into the field.
I am falling into that dirt and gravel;
there is blood.
 
Paper Bible and they didn’t let me
see her before she died.
 
Dog howls in September heat and
Her ghost visited me.
 
Mississippi blindness struck me
all I could see was night.
 
No cave for my heart and eyes only the
Wire desperate to pump light into my veins.
 
Glowing in the dark, a pale moon tricks me into
Laughter and I married and moved.

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Right on the Flowers (detail), 2023, ink and watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 in.

Camellias (detail), Dec. 2020, ink on paper, 5 x 8 in.

Paperwhites, Dec. 2020, ink on paper, 3.5 x 6.5 in.

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Celeste Schueler is a Mississippian, feminist, poet, and mother living in the Pacific Northwest. She loves books, libraries, museums, and frying catfish. She enjoys taking her twin daughters on adventures around the Puget Sound and writing poems. Her poem “For My Father” is included in the 2023 anthology Mid/South Sonnets by Belle Point Press. Most of her writing draws inspiration from her struggles with bipolar disorder.

Victoria Meek draws & paints with oil paint, ink, and color pencil. Often aided by observation, she summarizes or imagines experiences between dogs, plants, people / the stuff of people — including the experience of being alone. These imaginations have become a way of knowing a Thing or Place — a concept anchoring Meek's 2022 exhibition "Combing Visions" at Millsaps College. In a small room & in a semi-Salon style, she arranged disparately styled drawings & paintings of flowers, a garden, an arm, food scraps, a sycamore tree — all made in Jackson, Mississippi, where she has lived & worked since 2017.