Introduction
It’s not easy to write a poem about a person who’s close to you. Possibilities such as over-sentimentality or, on the other hand, the likelihood that the subject could be offended, often abort such a would-be poem. In any case, the writer lives in hope that his/her efforts wouldn’t give cause for cringing.
 
In “My Sister, the Wild Beauty Motorhead Becomes a Homemaker”, Erin Macchiaroli bares her soul over her relationship with her sister, Farlae. She does so in a curious way, presenting a list of facts that builds up the story of their relationship. This cold delivery is at odds with the warmth we’d expect from a poem dealing with sisters.
 
Ultimately, a note of distance burns through in the relationship. There’s less admiration, and the disillusion that simmered under the surface before rises to the surface. This gives a satisfying end to the poem, I think. It’s brave. It’s honest. And it certainly doesn’t make us cringe.
 
My Sister, the Wild Beauty Motorhead Becomes a Homemaker
She asks me to lift one end of the table, and slides under it like a mechanic with the screwdriver aimed at the broken 
       leg.
She asked for tools for Christmas when she was nineteen.
She’s good at math.
 
My sister is a giant beauty. The one who will dance first.
The one who will dance with her arms in the air and her eyes closed.
She’s a magnet,
and demands eyes in waiting rooms and grocery stores.
 
She’s a homemaker now with two kids,
a boyfriend with an auto body shop,
and a pit bull eating the legs off her couch.
 
She cooks like a mom, giving herself to domesticity,
dumping a can of green beans into the pot,
turning the flame on high and walking away.
 
The chicken cutlets degrease on paper towels, getting cold on the counter.
This meal is the color of 1977.
She offers: bottled water, sugarless soda, decaffeinated coffee, or Heineken.
She’s playing Marvin Gaye on the radio in the kitchen. Some kid has a rubber hand expanding in a glass of water on
       the shelf.
 
She gets her oil changed 3,000 miles on the nose.
 
She invited me over one day in August, and wasn’t home when I arrived
so I waited on her front stoop.
She rode up on a brand new motorcycle with a big smile
and a blonde ponytail sliding down her back. 
 
My sister’s busyness, her completeness, her pride
And her way of installing ceiling fans impress me.
 
I think about her, and call long distance.
When I hear her voice (after six months,)
I wish I hadn’t.
 
She tells me to hold on, and without moving the phone from her face
directs the kids where to put away non-perishables, laughs at the dog ravaging a stuffed baby, and says
       something/anything to her boyfriend calling him ‘babe’ all while I’m standing in my kitchen in Ireland alone, on
       hold.
 
We will talk around the gaps, and the distance, and hope that somewhere in the dead air is a mutual feeling that we are
       capable of more.
That would be enough.

Erin (on the right) and her sister Farlae

About Erin
I am a 36-year-old New Yorker who graduated from the NUI Galway MA in Writing program in 2009. I currently work for a non-profit environmental organization in Beacon, NY. After finishing my MA in Galway I spent the next five years living out a dream – seaside in Kinvara mastering the back roads of Clare. I co-hosted a radio show called Sunday Best on the now defunct Rascal Radio out of Co Mayo. My poems have been featured in Three Times Daily, The Clare Champion and Chronogram Magazine. Since returning to NY in 2013, I turned my attention to script writing, and am co-writing a series titled Home. I live with my new husband Robert on the banks of the Hudson River in Newburgh, NY.
 
Interview
I have to ask: what is the colour of 1977?
 
1977 is the faded autumnal colors of the afghan blankets my grandma crocheted in the 70s. A lot of our family photos feature her blankets draped over the back of a couch, spread across the foot of a bed or wrapped around a baby.
 
I just realized that Instagram has a “1977” filter! My grandma would be happy.
 
You paint a vivid portrait of the sister here. What I find particularly interesting and unusual about it is how you did so in such a matter-of-fact tone. Separate pieces of information are placed beside each other, creating some kind of mosaic in the reader's mind. Did you aim to reflect anything specific with this approach or did it just come out that way? 
 
It just came out that way. I write most of my poems as an observer. It takes some distance before I can work my way towards the final moments of hope/truth/acceptance.
 
The distance is palpable here, both physically and in terms of the sibling relationship. Do you think the physical distance has caused the emotional distance in any way, and was this connection behind the inspiration for the poem? Or would you cite something else as causing it?  
 
Years of physical distance can do many things to a relationship. In this case, we lost touch. On the rare occasions when we did talk, the contrast between our lives felt sharp. She was a busy mother and homemaker, and I was a writer living on my own in a rented cottage in Kinvara.
 
Ireland is a country of families, cousins, and uncles’ neighbors. I remember trying on clothes at the Dunne’s store in Ennis, and I could hear the other women in the dressing rooms. I could tell that they were sisters, and I think that’s what did it. I had to return to New York because I wanted to hear my sister’s voice through the walls of a dressing room.
 
Your poem presents the metamorphosis of a character/person. Do you see metamorphosis lurking behind many of your poems, or even behind poetry in general?
 
Absolutely. My writing likes to find its way towards the light.
 
Why do you write?      
                                                                                           
With poetry, I write because it’s the only way I can hold onto and share something fleeting. With script writing, I write because I like to present relatable characters, send them off on a path and see how they’ll hold up in the world.
 
If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?
 
My only simple “advice” would be to know that you are unique. There are no two of us the same. Keep writing in your own way and make it part of your routine.
 
If nothing else, writing is your gift to yourself, but share it when you can.

Introduction
There’s something gloriously melodramatic here. It’s almost a love poem, but love not for a woman, more for her particular physical “imperfection”. And from that, the speaker imagines the character of the waitress, which could be accurate or way off the mark. He seems sure that her life has changed for the better, but how sure can he be? Is he allowing his expectation to sway his perception?
 
The loose swing of her chatter is opposed by the speaker’s disappointment at her metamorphosis. You get the sense that he’d never express this to her. This delicate balance gives the poem a bittersweet taste. It’s clearly a poem of identity, but it’s not only the waitress who’s explored in this regard; it’s also the speaker and/or the poet – what kind of person speculates at such length about someone he seemingly knows only at a distance?
 
The poem itself has a “loose swing”, I think. It zips along at ease, studded with a few gems, such as the thin river and the idea that the waitress has become her own sister. Its ending surprised me, and it ends abruptly, potentially leaving the reader with the feeling that the speaker/poet is a different person to who we imagined throughout – transformed by the journey of writing the poem, as if it, too, is some kind of smoothening out.   
 
Waitress I Never Knew
 Harelipped you were beautiful,
   loon-lonely eyes and lithe
shape split by the veering, renegade                                   
   lip. Asymmetrical, utterly 
 
stirring. After the surgery I wasn’t
  even sure it was you, so nearly
regular your mouth, just a hint
   of up-pull, so flashing
 
your look. You seemed younger, less
  sad, less sure, too, as if  you
had become your own little sister. 
  How I wanted that wildly rising
 
line still to be there. I had no right. 
  I know your life is better now,
hear it in the loose swing of your chatter.
   But your glance – more flit
 
than flash. Something has been smoothed
  away I loved. At least one self
wrenched from bed by thugs you never
  knew, hustled off, never seen
 
again. Now it is left to find out
  what was lost in that line
you were born with, what became
  of the disappeared, what grace
 
resides in that thin river you
  no longer have to cross,
and where it may be found again,
  and why I worry so.
 
(Reprinted from Falling Body with permission from Salmon Poetry)

About David
My four collections of poems are Straddle, out in 2015 from Salmon Poetry, Falling Body and The Middleman, also from Salmon, and Cycling in Plato’s Cave, from Fomite Press in the U.S.A. My poems have also appeared in many journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and the U.K. I’ve been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize. Born and raised in Montreal, I’ve lived in Burlington, Vermont, for many years. After years as an associate dean at Johnson State College, I now work part-time there, teach a bit, and write as much as possible. My website address is http://dcavanagh.net.
 
Interview
Your poem is concerned with finding beauty in what society would typically deem ugly. Do you think society is too concerned with notions of beauty and ugliness, and is beauty important to poetry in any way?
 
It’s not, or not only, that society is too concerned with notions of beauty and ugliness, but that society is too concerned with conventional and clichéd notions of beauty and ugliness. Air-brushed models, both women and men, are rarely beautiful in my view. Beauty has something to do with personality, uniqueness, or the rightness of something in its setting. An aster in sunlight against a rock, a young girl playing classical violin on a street corner, blue paint peeling on a rusty fence… Beauty itself, and the appreciation of beauty, is part of the glory of being alive, so yes, it is crucially important to poetry. I could quote Keats here on truth being beauty, beauty being truth, but really all you need to do is look around to know how important beauty is to our everyday lives and wellbeing.
 
I find the grammar and the line breaks particularly interesting in this poem, particularly the first line and “Asymmetrical, utterly// stirring”. Can you comment on the choices you made in this regard, especially the somewhat unnatural-sounding line breaks?
 
Well, the poem has a regular structure, with four-line stanzas, lines of about the same length, with every other line indented. The “unnatural-sounding” line beaks you mention (enjambments) cut against that regular structure and keep the poem moving from line to line, stanza to stanza. They keep those stanzas from feeling too regular or static, just as the stanza forms keep the line breaks from seeming too odd or chaotic, or so I hope.  Maybe more important, the poem is about the relationship between the ordinary and the unusual, between symmetry and the asymetrical, the after and the before expressed in the face of the waitress. It’s appropriate that the form of the poem should mirror the coming together of the regular and the irregular.
 
This is very obviously a poem of observation, but would you say that observation in some form is common to all poetry? How does it feature in your own poetry in general?
 
Most poems depend on keen observation, by the poet and by the reader as well. Poems ask us and help us to pay close attention. They ask and help us to look at the surface that takes us below the surface -- something often missing from our fast-paced daily lives that too often call on us not to look or feel deeply but to glance over and keep moving. I wish I were better at paying close attention.
 
The cause for worry wasn’t clear to me at the end. Could you elaborate on what exactly you were getting at there?
 
That last line does come out of the blue, and it is somewhat mysterious. It’s mysterious for the narrator, too. On one level, he’s simply worried about the waitress. Maybe he has had a sudden sense that something has been or might be “lost” in his own life, too, as a result of things that have been “smoothed away” or made “nearly regular.” I don’t want to say much more. The feeling is clear, I hope, of deep concern, and of the need to understand.
 
Why do you write?
 
More mystery. It’s an impossible question, though there are partial answers: Because it makes me feel more alive than just about anything else, because something in me needs to express what I see or feel or experience and give it a form in words, because writing things down makes me experience them more fully, because it makes me feel better.
 
If you had one piece of advice for a writer, what would it be?
 
My advice would be: No one can give you any advice that will help. You’re on your own. Seriously, though, I don’t know. After many years I’m still feeling my way along, and most writers I know feel the same way. But if forced to reply, I might offer three bits that I try to tell myself over and over:  Pay close attention to the life you’re living; read, read, read other poets’ work; write a lot, daily if possible.