This Pattern of Light Wanders All Over the Ocean, Collecting Prey
From the hum of his hospital room, my memory-worn father asks for my elegant friend—Lilah with the starlit hair—so I don’t remind him how he’d once picked me up at midnight from the now-suicided Lilah’s house in a country that spat on justice, a country we’d left behind long ago along with Lilah and her mother, who, high on heroin, poked me out of her daughter’s bed with a kitchen knife, said get out get out get out of my girl’s life, and Dad remembers not the knife nor my name and only sometimes the land we left but says how wonderful, my girl, to have such a dear friend in this nebulous world.
*Title after a line from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.
Lisa Alletson’s stories and poems are published in Atticus Review, Bending Genres, The Cincinnati Review, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Ohio Review, among other journals. Her writing has appeared in Wigleaf’s Top 50 list, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Best MicroFiction. Her poetry chapbook, Good Mother Lizard, won the Headlight Review chapbook contest (2022). You can find her as @LisaAlletson on BlueSky, Instagram and Facebook, and find links to her published writing at www.lisaalletson.com.
