2025 Epistolary Challenge SECOND PLACE WINNER: “Dear Sarah” By Christian Collier
Frontier Poetry is excited to congratulate the Frontier Editorial team’s pick for the SECOND PLACE winner of the 2025 Epistolary Challenge: “Dear Sarah“ by Christian Collier.
What begins as a private address—Dear Sarah—unfolds into a reckoning with a first intimacy shaped as much by invention as by desire. This poem revisits a moment of youthful closeness tracing how innocence, fear, and longing conspired to a moment of both beauty and secrecy. As the speaker moves between memory, devotion, and regret the beloved is preserved in a quartz-lit past. Lush, confessional, and haunted by what was withheld, the poem becomes a meditation on sexual becoming, silence, and the way first loves linger—caroling—long after the truth has learned how to speak.
Enjoy his poem below.
Dear Sarah
Until now, I’ve kept the lie alive.
I was no more than you suspected
when you kissed the sweat that slicked my hairy breast, tasting
first, the virgin hiding in me, then his disgrace.
When you asked if I’d ever before waded into
a woman’s warmth & bliss,
I knew no other way to answer than
with a fiction my lean, timid hips belied.
At eighteen, I was sure if I spoke the truth,
the words would’ve soured the spell that opened you to me
on a trembling twin-sized bed barely big enough to hold you.
In front of the Oxford blue glare of your computer screen,
I rued my lack of a history.
The nothing I’d done gave me my uncertain, unseasoned motion
& yet, in the stillest hours, when the nightjars mutely maraud
through 2 AM’s gusts & starless gable green penumbra,
you flickered, then arched—spangled & cast a wobbly E7 into the air
& as you settled, silently, I bid God look away while I named you
my semi-messiah. My blush-peppered idol
whose musk I wished no soap nor water would peel from me.
Time is a bruja always attempting to soil what gets remembered.
I’ve been devout in keeping you dustless thus far,
clad in the gleam of a quartz light.
You are the past still caroling.
I am Lot’s wife still looking back.
Christian Collier
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere.
