“The Carrying Kind” is a beautifully descriptive poem. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?

My brother lost his infant daughter, and it is an all-encompassing grief, an unbearable grief, that no one knew how to process or “carry.” I desperately wanted to help him. I still cannot comprehend the unbearable pain he continues to feel.

The sentence in the middle of the poem, “I keep asking the angels to transform him but they don’t keep ordinary time,” breaks the poem into what the “he” of the poem is doing to overcome death, and what death is doing. Can you talk about how this sentence is a transition and what it does for the poem?

I was thinking about how time can lose its linearity during certain life experiences, like during grief, where time seems to fold in on itself. This is also what happens when you have a baby, so there is a duality here in those experiences. I feel like I was working with inside and outside forces here and using that to break the poem, so that maybe the reader can feel that sense of brokenness emotionally through the transition. There is this struggle in the poem, a wrestling match of will, of peace-making, and there is also this ache of the witness who cannot “carry” that grief for someone they love. Their constant shapeshifting of death, the weight, of death, and of the physical and emotional processing of such crushing grief. Time almost disappears. I hope that it makes the poem feel simultaneously bound and timeless.

There’s so much tension in this poem, sustained by quiet sounds and specific details. How did you work to develop this tension?

I developed this tension through sustaining the duality of the mundane with the weight and complexity of grief. There is a sense of the day-to-day movement of time pushing forward, with its concrete nouns and physicality, but the undercurrent of grief provides this constant dark pull of invisible weight. I felt like there was this sort of pounding down of the person holding the death in their body, and I kept imagining how grief grinds one down into bits. I was also working with the feeling and images of how we can disassociate during times like these.

Did this poem go through different formats before you decided on this one?

I have been working nearly exclusively in the prose poem form for about a two years now because it has been serving the content in my forthcoming collection “Today I Wear the Bear Head,” which won the 2026 Press 53 Award for Poetry. The prose poem form serves this piece because it feels dense, and it also begs to be held and carried. It is slide a stone, a headstone perhaps, or a swaddled thing, a heart wound tight and hiding itself in the body. I am always open to what a poem needs formally, but this piece kept its form, and I worked more on imagistic and sound details that aimed to convey this unbelievable ache, and really, despair.

What themes do you find that you write about?

The themes I often write about are the female body, body horror, motherhood, family, pop-culture, grief, and lineage. Many of the topics I write about arrive through a surreal lens.

What authors or books do you find you return to?

The authors I return to are Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Dean Young, Charles Simic, James Tate. More contemporary authors include Shivani Mehta, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Heather Christle, Danez Smith, Diane Seuss, and Chen Chen.

What are you working on currently?

I am putting together my second collection of poetry currently entitled “Imitate/Intimate.” I am in the final stages of completing my first novel, “Half Monsters.” My biggest dream is to write a screen play, so that is the next big thing.

Amanda Chiado holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, California College of the Arts, and Grand Canyon University. Her chapbook Prime Cuts was just released from Bottlecap Press, and she is the author of Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has most recently appeared in Southeast Review, RHINO, The Pinch Journal, The Offing, and numerous other publications. She is an alumna of the Community of Writers and the Highlights Foundation. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press.

You have two poems in Volume 28 of Water~Stone, “lEcogodliness” and “Always Incomplete.” In “Ecogodliness,” what drew you to use brackets instead of parentheses?

In the full collection of poems, Ecogodliness is a series with all the same title. This particular “Ecogodliness” uses brackets instead of the parenthetical, because I was looking to convey a polyvocality that honored it’s disruptive nature, both formally and in expression. The metaconversation that is being formed is both an interior one but also a larger societal one of self-denial, of withholding, of shame (of being a woman of color who still brings in Emerson to a poem and what that means of what poets get taught and what sticks in society), and of connectivity. The hard edges of the brackets felt demonstrably more worrisome than the smooth edges of parenthesis for this poem. That worry feels important. 

“Always Incomplete” is so very gentle in its totality. There’s even the slightly comedic images of axons with their “feet up on the couch, slurping raspberry slushies.” Where did the gentleness come from? The comedy?

Wow, thank you for this generous “so very gentle in its totality.” What a gift! Also, you seeing the comedy as a reader makes me feel seen. I’m honored by you feeling this intended gentleness. 

I laughed every day during chemo. I had to. Five months is no drop in the bucket in one’s existence. Some days, I was at the infusion center for six hours or more. Having an imagination, poking fun at a shitty situation, being willing to joke about the possibility of death, loss, a difference in my body made me feel more like myself and not just a ‘cancer patient.’ This poem arose from finding out that in the last six weeks of chemo, the Taxol (chemo drug) was frying my nerve endings in my hands and feet. I had to make the decision to end treatment early as the doctors were afraid the nerve damage would be even more severe. The poem’s epicenter becomes more on the choices we make, the beliefs we have, and the invoking of the imaginary, the surreal, to explain the world to ourselves. It’s also a strange love poem to my slushy-slurping axons and belief in my own body. The humor becomes the gentleness. Gentleness, which exists, even in strange, painfilled situations. 

When dealing with a medical topic in poetry, how do you find a balance between fact and feeling?

It’s not really about balance, as there’s always feeling in facts. Facts are never objective, because humans have a role in socially constructing them. Somatically, there are facts in feelings as well. The two are extremely interconnected. I often see it as I’m using feeling to back up a fact in my poetry, not the other way around. I love me some facts. Facts are powerful but become uninteresting/overwhelming/unspecific if not contextualized by our emotional response or impact they have to the voice or experience of the poem. We are brought to poetry to experience, think, and feel. The feeling in a fact matters. For me, personally, the story isn’t that I was diagnosed with aggressive stage two breast cancer, it’s what I did with that information, how I felt, and how processing alongside facts and an ancient Codex from my lineage, felt divined. The facts become lifted up by the emotions. 

What themes do you return to?

Oh, I’m obsessed with the body. Obsessed with body-knowledge and cognitive-feeling interact. The body as materiality, and also movement and also thought-synapsing, with the latter two being more unexplainable magic. Language as a construct—all its glorious failures and connective potential— including using English, with its violent history toward marginalized people, to reclaim use for me, my beloveds, BIPOC, Queer, and Trans folx. I’ll also be honest, my anger has been uncontained lately— genocide of Palestinian people, US fascism, ICE killing innocent people, US leaving the World Health Organization and global climate groups, the list is heartbreakingly long. Yet—Minneapolis showing the country a blueprint on how to show up for each other, how to resist. Yet— rallies across the country for ICE OUT. Lots of yets too. Liberatory practices are deeply ingrained in my belief in poetry. Poetry as dissent. I return to that too. Art is powerful. I’m reading Nikki Giovanni right now, Black Feeling, Black Talk/ Black Judgement. She doesn’t mince words. We need that right now. 

What books are your favorites? What authors do you admire?

I have so many favorites, so I’ll give you the poetry books I’m in the middle of today: Donika Kelly’s The Natural Order of Things, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s I Don’t Want to Be Understood, Cathy Linh Che’s, Becoming Ghost, Kinsale Drake’s The Sky Was Once A Dark Blanket, Chet’la Sebree’s Blue Opening, Mai Der Vang’s Primordial, and Kimberly Alidio’s Traceable Relations. 

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a hybrid book of poetry driven by the Zuihitsu form, vignettes, and docupoems. These ecopoems are through the lens of a Latina researcher investigating climate change with an attunement to impacts on Latine experiences in the Anthropocene. The manuscript traces contemporary environmental issues using portents and more-than-human indicators such as glaciers, sediments, bees, fanshell mussels, and more. This project is off the curtails of my book Murmuration Archives— a project that took me to the Vatican Apostolic Library to study the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, one of the few ancient Mesoamerican sacred texts to survive the Spanish colonization of Mexico— that will release from Noemi Press in August 2026. Both of these poems from WSR are inside this upcoming book, although in slightly different forms. Murmuration Archives was an immense amount of research combined with my own personal journey of fighting breast cancer in 2022 and 2023. El Cielo En Nuestros Ojos :: Ecological Inamorata Poem Pulse, the new project, digs my heals into both field research and ecological docupoetics even further. My hope is to have a full draft of the manuscript ready in Summer 2026. We’ll see. In both of these manuscripts, I’ve felt that tinge of I have no idea what I’m doing. I take this as a good sign. It means I’m risking in my poetry in new way, in ways that make the discomfort a signal for something unexpected. I’m using doubt as encouragement here, letting the doubt come to the page feels crucial. 

Felicia Zamora’s eight books include Murmuration Archives (Akrilica Series, Noemi Press 2026), Interstitial Archaeology (Wisconsin Poetry Series 2025) and I Always Carry My Bones (Iowa Poetry Prize/Ohioana Book Award—Poetry). She has won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C. P. Cavafy Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, and has received residencies/fellowships from CantoMundo, Tin House, and Yaddo. Her poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, The Nation, and Orion. She’s an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for Colorado Review.

Your poem, “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles,” is about a couple preparing to have guests over—but deeper than that, about connection and community in a shifting world. What inspired this poem?

Thank you for this opportunity to respond to your questions and for your reading my poem with a sense for its deeper life, for its theme of “connection and community in a shifting world.” My poem and I are purring with gratitude.

The inspiration for “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles,” was something my partner said while were we housecleaning in anticipation of her brother and his wife coming for a 4th of July visit. I’m standing in the upstairs bathroom holding a toilet brush, facing a wall, talking loudly to Sarah in the kitchen, about how having houseguests is great but we always have to do tons of cleaning ahead of time. She switched off the garbage disposal’s growl and replied, ”Well, at least it makes us clean.” That unexpected sentence stuck me, standing brush in hand above a bowl full of blue water, and I thought, Well, true, it does do that.

It might sound strange, but I don’t much care what my poems are about. I’m more interested in trying to make language dance. I never think of themes or topics ahead of time. I’m generally surprised by what comes out. It’s not usually the big deal experiences of life, things about which friends might say, “Oh, you’re probably going to write a poem about that.” It’s mostly the mundane moments and memories of everyday life. Which is fine because that’s the kind of life we all live most of the time. And more importantly, I don’t want my poems to be about experiences and emotions. Instead, I want them to be experiences in and of themselves which will cause emotions in the reader. 

This housecleaning moment came back to me a few days later as I sat down at the patio table to do my morning writing. After a diary entry about barbequing swordfish and playing ukelele, I wrote a not very good draft of a poem titled, “A Field Trip Is Many Things,” about visiting the Cleveland Natural History Museum when I was a kid. I remembered climbing on an 18-foot-long, 8-foot-tall stegosaurus statue on the front lawn. It was made of fiberglass but it was awesome. I recalled the feeling of trying to fold my legs in between the vertical plates on its back. 

Then out came the first draft of “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles.” It’s got the housecleaning in it, the recent barbequing, and memories of what usually happens whenever we have houseguests, the lovely during and the even lovelier after. Then I wrote a “to do” list for the day and the draft of a new stir fry recipe. 

I waited years before I typed up and revised the draft. I usually do that. Letting time pass between initial composition and revision helps me see the poem better.

Food is a recurring theme throughout this piece. Can you talk about how food plays such a pivotal role, and how that developed?

When I was an undergraduate, in the mid 1990s, I put together my first photocopied, saddle-stapled book of my own poetry. I called it Two Notions of Apples. For the cover image I used a 1930 photograph by Anton Stankowski of a spoon and fork tucked up in what looks like a little bed, ready for a cozy night’s sleep together.

I gave the book to a friend who read it and observed that so many of the poems were about food. This came as a complete surprise to me. I reread it and sure enough he was right. And that’s never gone away. I never decided to write about food so often. It just comes out. And without knowing it, for my first little homemade book, I’d chosen a cover image that combined what would be two of the biggest themes of my writing life so far, food and love.

Some of my later photocopied books had titles such as: Melon Balls, Drive Thru: Confessions of a Fast Food Daddy, and Bellyaches.

I’m thankful for all of my writing obsessions, because they get me actually putting pen to paper instead of staring at a blank page hoping one of my cats will come into the room and write some poems for me. I know they would do this if I asked them, but [a] they charge too much money, and [b] their poems are usually full of swears, and who needs that?

The poem ends with the exhale of relief when the guests leave, but it began with this feeling of waiting through the winter for this moment. Can you talk about how the piece is bookended?

Here in Syracuse the winters last about 20 years each, so by late April we’re chewing at the walls waiting for the ice-time to end, dreaming of how great spring will be. Sometimes it is actually great, and sometimes it’s just a soggier, muddier, slightly sunnier version of winter. Oh well. There’s a tension and release structure to experiences like this, which is probably one of the little rivers running deep inside the poem. The tension of anticipation and the release of outcome.

Bookending is a lovely way for a poem to find its form, isn’t it? Sometimes I’m conscious about doing it, but usually it happens intuitively. I suppose one could say that one of the themes of this poem is the difference between the anticipation of an event and the aftermath of that actual event. So revisiting the poem’s opening feels right for its ending. 

While I’m swirling that blue water with my toilet brush, not having the best of times, maybe resenting slightly the approaching houseguests necessitating this chore, I console myself remembering the excited lovemaking my partner and I usually enjoy once the front door clicks shut behind our beloved guests pulling out of the driveway. A reliable version of tension of release, more reliable than a Syracuse spring.

Did this poem go through different formats before you decided on this one?

Sure did. Most of my poems do. 

I write all of my drafts by hand in prose. I write too fast to think about line breaks, but I only bother writing anything in the first place if it arrives with a pulse, with a rhythm. After I get a first draft more or less completed, I type it up and try to feel for the heartbeat inside the sentences. Those determine the basic length of the lines. The actual line breaks are another matter.

“Why Our Bathtub Sparkles” has, in my idiosyncratic scansion, a five-beat line. It’s a length in which I often end up writing. Five beats are long enough for me to get a bunch of stuff going on inside the line, so they don’t feel too linear or thin. But again, I don’t choose this consciously. It’s the rhythm that the first draft spontaneously came out with, and I try to listen for it as I shape the sentences into verse.

Sometimes as I do this I discover that there is no verse rhythm inside the sentences. In that case, I allow the temporary lineated version to help me find words to trim out and other changes to make, and then I turn the piece back into a prose poem. I love prose poetry!

What themes do you find that you write about?

Readers of my poems are probably the best people to respond to this question. Just as it took me by surprise that the poems I was writing as an undergraduate were so often about food, I probably can’t see all of the themes in my poetry today. Which is fine. Which is beautiful actually. I endeavor to write my poetry from a place other than my silly old thinky brain.

Having said that, I know I often write about, well, food and love. Plus grocery shopping, gardening, science news, friendships, death, sex, bugs, cats, anxiety, the sky, my backyard, birds, the Big Bang, my parents, trees, and rivers. But mostly food and love.

What authors or books do you find you return to?

These days, I keep closest to my writing journal poetry books by Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Vievee Francis, Mary Ruefle, Arthur Sze, and C.D. Wright.

Only slightly further away on my desk, but always within arm’s reach, are James Tate, Russell Edson, Lynn Emanuel, Charles Simic, Laura Kasischke, Diane Seuss, Michael Earl Craig, Kimiko Hahn, John Berryman, Dorianne Laux, Richard Hugo, Ross Gay, T.S. Eliot, and Franz Wright. 

What are you working on currently?

That’s such a generous thing to ask. Thank you! And thank you again for this opportunity to talk.

I’m finalizing the manuscript of what I hope will be my third book of poetry, whose working title right now is The New Avenues the Only Avenues We Have. “Why Our Bathtub Sparkles” is in this manuscript.

I’m working on the remaining lyric essays for a full-length manuscript of creative nonfiction. Currently I’m knee-deep in an essay about the junky old brook that runs behind a strip mall near my house, inspired by reading Robert Macfarlane’s new book Is a River Alive? 

My friend Dustin Nightingale and I are finalizing our full-length manuscript of collaborative prose poetry, whose working title is I Am the Owner of a Small Punctured Tire. 

And on top of everything else, as always, I try to start most mornings by writing new poems in my journal, before the day begins with its many impingements, including those good old household chores. 

Christopher Citro is the author of two full-length poetry books: If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). In 2025 he had two collaborative poetry chapbooks published: The Box We Put the World in to Keep a Corner from Shattering (Aureole Press), co-written with Steve Castro and Dustin Pearson, and I Wear a Top Hat When I Go into the Forest (Ghost City Press), co-written with Dustin Nightingale. Christopher lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.