POET.
Alongside acting, Maeghan is also a young poet. She has been featured in several online and in print magazines such as Indolent Books’s What Rough Beast, The Minetta Review, Oakland Arts Review, Catfish Creek, The Rational Creature Magazine, and October Hill Magazine. Additionally, Maeghan is very passionate about arts activism, specifically deflating the stigma around mental health. Her poetry has been displayed at the NYU Diversity Arts Festival as well as The International Human Rights Arts Festival.
Take a listen to Maeghan's voiceover work for selected published poems by Passengers Journal.
Scroll down to read and find links to some of her most recent work!
Knife Block
After some time away from being a poetry reader and voice-over artist, Maeghan makes a comeback to Passengers Journal as a poet in Volume 4, Issue 3. You can take a look at the piece online or purchase a paperback version on Amazon via the links below. Online, the poem has been audio recorded by John E. Brady.
Quarter
Invited to a Paz Lifestyle pop-up poetry reading in Brooklyn, Maeghan debut a new spoken word piece about turning 25.
Denouncing Manic Pixie Dream Girl
This piece can be found in the 42nd issue of Slipstream Magazine which is themed "Bread-Blood-Beats".
My body is pickled
from the Georgi orange soda sea
and wandered into a tideland
with Sylvia, and my sister’s chemicals.
I ask my frame to forgive,
but the stomach is a sandbag
and the collarbones are leeches,
smarting from the pooling.
With two of me in the world:
my figure will speak
at my mind’s funeral, like a maggot
growing fatter from endings.
Mad at me, me mad at me,
singing the banished skin lullaby
eroded from the torrent,
a retched up cycle
back to brain to blame to bile.
Is this how we talk to ourselves?
Back and forth mind to flesh:
a willful flood of charming self contempt
Each thigh fold is a lie
permanently in the pleats
and my forehead lines are trapping pits
lying in wait for when I imagine
if she’d finished the cut.
My scaffolding reminds me:
I am no keeper, no rock, no savior,
just a fluid sack that could not defend,
but took notes for my own finale.
3:47am
Written (shockingly) at 3:47am during the height of the 2020 quarantine, this poem was actually found for publication by Sunday Mornings at the River via Maeghan’s poetry Instagram! It is featured in their “365 Days of COVID” anthology and is availible to purchase on Amazon.
Quarantime
published by Indolent Books's What Rough Beast
By 3pm, I have washed my sheets and the dreams from underneath my fingernails.
At 9am, I wake to discounted cereal, college loan emails, and cat litter like glitter.
Around noon, I imagine the dancing I will do and reenact it in the sliver of hardwood I have between kitchen and couch.
7 to 7:05pm the neighborhood beats pans and hollers cheers at a city on fire.
When 4pm hits I take a third shower. Sitting down.
11pm I check the front door. Deadbolt, chain, and knob.
5am the sun has whacked my feet, the mason jars, the journals, my E.E. Cummings collection, the remnants of last night’s habits.
2pm literally doesn’t matter. Just like his latest demonic tweet. I must remind myself.
6pm falls on the unfinished, bottlecap-infested roof where I practice handstands and wishing with my eyes open
10pm I lock the door again. Then hate myself for cleaning all the mirrors.
Somewhere near 1am, I stare blankly at a cabinet filled with goods that have followed me from my last two apartments. Unopened.
8:30am my sheets are still damp. The dryer sucks.
Midnight is when I listen to the same song fifteen times and sit in my window sill, watching nothing pass into the street lamps.
My mother is the only one who texts me back at any time, though I swear I am a good friend.
3:07am graces my warped ceiling harder than warm vodka or kissing in corners. And I am reminded that sleep feels just as unproductive.
Anonymous Unity
published by The Oakland Arts Review
crying on the A train
across from lipstick stained diet coke cans
yesterday’s paper at Canal
there’s a surfboard underground
book nerds and earbud buddies contained in a single metal dinghy
Chambers brings baggage
sleeps not stirring at doorbells
the widespread dick-sit parades over more than a single block
makeup is needed at Fulton
and gum, white, probably two sticks considering the sound
High brings a cold
tissues I wish I had before the blow
funny how New Yorkers only wear black
kids play at Jay
eyes red like mine
decriminalized joy in stop-n-go air
I get up to catch another letter at Hoyt
whacking lipstick lady with tears and the ends of my scarf
they say trauma is passed down through bloodlines
and here that sadness is pumped through the inner weaving veins
beneath The City
she now has me with her
to pass off when it is her turn
Chain Link
published by The Hickory Playground's "Quarantine Diaries"
I’m tired yet all I do is sleep or not sleep, but rest or just lay, wash until I peel, hit snooze over and over, I’ve realized that my bed may look like my bed but it is only who was in it, who I share it with, what ghosts, where is my family, I feel so far away, lonely for myself for balls to the wall love, reckless poisonous public displays of bodily addiction, tell me I’m bigger than my lips, my notebooks full of wishes and secrets, am I a liar, have I cheated on myself, have I forgotten what it’s like to live freely, to fly with feet still on the ground, does earth no longer want me, jealous that I am between clay and cloud, I am grimy and floating, but the gears have a mind of their own, gas for blood, veins imploding from any consumption, I shift from materialist to minimalist, from eating every atom to sewing the throat with needles I’m too scared to put in my ears or wrist, bracelets are bones slowly turning to ash, cartilage just food for others, pellets of charity because no one would ever spare change, so I’ll bring home infected street pennies to feel the warmth of a copper bed.