No Imagination, by Laura Chalar

Untitled, by Adriana Sanz (Uruguay) contemporary

No Imagination
            
My mother’s dream beach is wintry-bright and lonely
like this one. A gruff wind pushes clouds aside,

bullies the dunes into odd rises. I ask if this is Solís,
with its long skies and sand so fine you can almost

see through it, and she says no, no, I just copied it
from a photo. I have no imagination. That’s what she

will say when I pester her with my big ideas about
what she should do with all that free time, with the art 

supplies she’s bought and left there to gather dust: I’m not 
like you. I couldn’t do that. You know I have no imagination.

I never tell her it was her imagination stirred mine to more,
the mind changed, thought picking up and stretching

into substance like the shadows pressed by dipping light 
on a beach that could be Solís, the one we go back to and love,

but is no place we know, oh no, just copied from some photo.  

​Laura Chalar

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.