Dear Staz,
Poetry by Arabella F.
9th-12th GRADE RUNNER-UP FOR SPRING 2026 POETRY CONTEST. Prompt: Write a letter poem (also known as an epistolary poem) — a poem that is addressed to someone or something. The recipient of the letter can be directly named or implied.
Hey Staz, where are you?
Are you up there? Dangling from the monkey bars, kicking the gravity from your legs?
Are angels really floating eyes, or are they anatomically accurate Barbie dolls with dismembered flight wings of a once lonely dove?
What’s your address so that I can send a bit of my confidence with you, don’t let your fire turn to ash… Or do you now avoid fire, given your history?
Place a backpack on a seat next to you in the nosebleeds for me. We will snicker and giggle as we survey others who were like us — performing with no perception of when it’s the final act.
Are you still petite with dancing azure eyes that don’t hold their attention for long or have you taken a different form, one that would be hard for me to recognize?
How do you occupy your new found freedom, or does time even exist? Is it boring..? With what I know of that place, it’s no more interesting than here. But when I arrive, it will be too late to compare.
Can you find forgiveness amongst the lint in your pockets?
Both for him and me?
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Are the eyes / Barbies telling you to forgive or did you come by it through your own volition?
I knew something was wrong that night. I didn’t fight the adults when they forced our goodbyes.
I should have planted my feet like the roots of the trees across the street in Douglass Park and allowed your arms around my neck to bind us.
Was that your way of telling me, to communicate how your thread was fraying as the fates bickered over your burned bones? You were so young and yet I choose to believe it.
I allowed myself to swallow the sweet fiction served to me, the details avoided and dismissed?
Five years later you urged me to type your name in the search bar in hopes of finding a news report. I heard your damned voice in my head to piece together the circumstances of your death.
Why do you still haunt me?
On those black nights, when I contemplate why I should be alive, you make me cry harder. Your evaporated shadow testifies of the ills of the world, making me want to leap from my windowsill and be swaddled in your embrace.
As I get older and experience brand new firsts, consider potential colleges and my future dreams and my career choice… I know that you won’t be anywhere through any of it.
I miss you, Staz. Will you wait for me, so I can experience all of eternity beside my friend, the person I’ve held in my heart for nearly a decade?
Please?
Your oldest and most loyal friend,
Me.
