As the recent foster parent to a cat, I found that Manuela Amiouny’s poem hit me extra hard.
“I Can’t Decide What to Feel About This Life” appears in the current issue of Radon Journal. It’s a beautiful, tragicomic exploration of the existential crisis-thinking that hits you when you’re simply moving through the house — cooking, tidying, making sure your cat drinks enough water. “If a watched pot never boils,” the narrator reasons, “maybe / a watched world never ends.”
Keep reading for a deep dive into the poem, and (in celebration) cat pics from the Radon staff.
The poem’s innovative structure takes you through two ways of thinking about the situation. On the one hand, there’s a deep dread, full of planets colliding and the universe spinning towards entropy; on the other hand, a more stoic acceptance and commitment to the little things and the present moment. Amiouny describes it as a “choose-your-own-adventure” poem.
Interview
Manuela Amiouny (author site here) is a writer of speculative fiction/poetry who’s been published in Augur Magazine, Heartlines Spec, Small Wonders, and others. She has also been the Heartlines Spec poetry editor since August 2025.
In her interview with Radon, she discusses Canadian speculative fiction and poetry, and how she designed the two halves of the poems to diverge and interrelate. She also discusses how a key verse in the poem —
the best I can do in this
state of perpetual emergency
is remind my cat to drink his water
came from her relationship with her own cat, Maamoul.
Fun fact about cats: They don’t feel thirst, so they genuinely forget to drink and they usually get most of their hydration from food. This can lead to a lot of health problems, so making sure they drink/stay hydrated is important. A seemingly mundane gesture is life-saving care, and if there are days where the best I can do is make sure that this small creature that lives in my house and that I adore stays healthy, then that counts for something.
“I Can’t Decide” is full of beautiful lines and striking similarities drawn between the familial world of humans and their creatures, and the larger violent movements of the universe. In some ways, the narrator’s kitchen is a microcosm of the vast chaos beyond — or maybe it’s the reverse, and the macrocosm is actually responding to the minute, gentle gestures of the kitchen.
You can also pick up how the same person in different moods and circumstances thinks about the same concepts in different ways. The trepidatious narrator is both wondered and frightened at the “cosmic egg”; the narrator moving throughout the kitchen observes a “yolk” in the sunrise. Both images are equally compelling, and you can feel the truth of each emotional state.
Our lil comparative highlights of the imagery parallels:
Turntable
As always, Amiouny sent Radon 3 songs that complimented the poem. Give them a listen below:
Cats of Radon Journal
As promised, here’s a gallery of pics from Radon’s staff and editors! We couldn’t do it without them.
Thanks for reading!
Radon is an award-winning journal publishing sci-fi prose and poetry relating to anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia. For more work, our latest issues, and information about submitting, click below.
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This was one of my favourite poems during the reading series I ran in April, so this post and the interview are especially inspiring.