Could Have Been, by Laura Chalar

Could Have Been 

photographs by Julie Blackmon

This, then, is the childhood
You didn’t have--the boisterous

Cousinry, your own siblings
Everywhere, spilling out of a many-

Windowed house with slanting
Dusk-tiled roofs, copious staircases

And high rooms, sluggishly
Deserting the cooling pool

For the lawn’s fever of fireflies 
Or being put to bed in shared

Quarters of shabby affluence.
But let’s hear it for the family

And life you did get: the vivid
Longings, fraught love seeping

Out the corners of fuzzy first
Days of school or torrid

Christmas Eves around small tables
(Hard-bought toys thronging the tree)--

Let’s hear it for complicated
Tenderness, and frayed ties

Tougher than the sturdiest lintel. 

Laura Chalar

​This poem was published in the chapbook Unlearning (Coal City Press, 2018).

Laura Chalar was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a lawyer and writer whose most recent poetry collection, Unlearning, was published by Coal City Press in 2018. Her short story collection The Guardian Angel of Lawyers was published by Roundabout Press in 2018.