OCTOBER 2026: Ruby Maghoney

Aldrin Badiola

— 1 min read
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"I am sipping
sky from an open breast..."

For October's Maryland Artist of the Month, Artists from Maryland is featuring Ruby Maghoney! Below, you will find her poem, and an artist's statement.

Ruby Maghoney lives in Baltimore, MD. She currently works at the University of Maryland, Baltimore for the Network of the National Library of Medicine. Her poem, "I squeezed the world like a tangerine" was published in Frontier Poetry and selected for inclusion in The Red Mare Press Collection 2025.

Patterson

Harbor’s breath stayed with the branches when dawn
had blushed a solar peach and black birds pecked

at strings like steamers, drunk
or forgiving that this ground was salt

just yesterday or that winter’s bruise
was all ten fingers

purpling on their armistice, a small fur
spells “I AM STILL HERE” in spearmint.

I realize again
this life grows peas and that the homesick fly

home and that the slow shell is shameless and for now
I am sipping

sky from an open breast, wearing only
silver maple, watching the beast that slept,

asking if she remembers when she begged
for thin-papered kites, a small fur spells

“I AM SOFT AS BONE”.

//

I didn’t grow up in Maryland, but I envy those who did in the way that perspective is clearer here; the seasons really do feel like a second consciousness. I find myself more thorough and hopeful in the space separating a tree’s branches, within a park of small inhabitants, and I feel lucky to be an observer. Maryland very much is the change in temperature that one is craving in their chest, and I cannot deny that living by water is what I have dreamt of. My small corner of life currently rests on bricks in between a vast parkland and the harbor, and how can you not be transformed by that? Patterson is that green space one cannot take for granted, and I believe everyone has their own emotional Patterson. After all, hibernation, regeneration, and migration are not unfamiliar tales. And yet, I feel as if I just now understand them, here in this corner of great rebirth.