Poem of the Week | September 01, 2025

“March” by Christine Byrne is our Poem of the Week.

Christine Byrne is a writer based in Baltimore. She studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she won the John Logan Poetry Prize and the Arthur James Pflughaupt Prize in Poetry. Her debut collection was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and her most recent work is forthcoming or appears in the New England Review, Best New Poets, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

March

My grandmother’s moon eye wary
one big pupil swallowing
her iris in a freak bleed
and what should’ve felt like the opposite
boys in a forest playing who could withstand
a lit cigarette against a forearm the longest
wad of crumpled twenties
stolen from my supermarket register
dried irises wedged in the passenger sun visor
I smashed my father’s car up on I-80 West
where glass and meridian seemed to complicate
what it meant to measure by yard
cocker spaniel roped
to a shed your dad kept padlocked
flicking the side of your face to say
he could tell when you were afraid
I stepped against the back
elastic of my underwear
as you whispered you would do
anything I wanted
before drowning yourself in the inlet
where river meets lake
Johnny, I have all these memories of fields now
steelmakers walking darkened up main
street as if a closeness to something unbreakable
could make you more of a man
my father’s insistence on storm windows
preparing for imaginary floods
patching my weak eye so I can look now, straight
into the eyes of this highway
like rock paper
scissors shooting buckshot to scatter up birds
testing a knuckle against ordinary glass
right now in my head
I am biking past the beach fire, smell of gasoline
at the boat pump
the dog on your back lawn told to run
against its own neck—
 
I remember March, reaching
to touch your face, and thinking that I had you

Author’s Note

“March” is part of a book-length series of poems. I wrote this piece after moving from Iowa to Baltimore, which was the third cross-country move of my twenties. I hadn’t expected to start over so many times. To me, this poem feels inextricably linked to the feeling of that very specific summer—sleeping on the floor of an unfurnished apartment, in a place where I didn’t know anyone, thinking about what got me here, of home, and of kinds of inheritances.

If you enjoyed this poem and want to read more, check out the Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week collection.