Differentiation

“Morning of a Child #3”- Anna Smetanenko

I sit in radiology waiting rooms and try to think my way out from their basements, always small, always, so far, with just one other person waiting; the last one read loudly from a Bible; this latest one paces our small shared space, back and forth and back again, the fingertips of one hand pressed to her temple as if trying to hold something in or maybe more like trying to find it, fingertips as magnets–she’s speaking rapid–I think–Arabic from which I am able every so often to pluck medical words and feel a moment of satisfaction at the jolt of a feeling of clarity in this place with its close walls and low drop ceiling where after a while
my vision blurs, and I’m not even the one in the machine. When it’s over, the doctor will walk us through the images, point out the new edges of light against the darkness of your brain, marking the latest thing from the last, show us the line at the end of what we know, our new horizon.

About the Author

Tamar Jacobs' work appears with Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, Free State Review, and elsewhere. Her unpublished novel, A Kind of Music Not a Song, was long listed for the Janus Prize awarded by the Chautauqua Institute, and her chapbook, A Man Named Thaddeus Williams, won the 2023 Outwrite Fiction Prize and was subsequently published by Neon Hemlock Press. She is a Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize winner. 

About the Artist

Anna Smetanenko is a multidisciplinary artist from Zhytomyr, Ukraine, researching concepts such as consciousness, AI, and faith. Her prose about Maidan was published in Rising for Freedom and Democracy in Ukraine by Brine Books Publishing. Her artwork has been exhibited in international galleries and published in Columbia Journal, Radar Poetry, Rock & Sling, Tint Journal, and elsewhere.