Lot’s Daughters

by Shawn Nacona Stroud
Desert Moon Review
Second Place, May 2017
Judged by R.T. Castleberry


We’d left mother, abandoned her as we had Sodom
where she hardened with a crackling
beside us. A salt pillar of disobedience
gawking back at the sin we’d fled
as it roared and trembled
like our fear rattling the earth.

In those times, the air hazed with brimstone,
we had only our saddened wide-eyed father
as we crunched up-slope
from the cities of the plain. Each night
the sky blazed orange as if gazing out
through the eye of our sun—
the angered glare of God.

Beneath a lambent darkness,
we would nourish father
with our finest vintage, always
there in service of his needs
just as mother would have been.


A slyly written look at one of the darker corners of the Old Testament. --R.T. Castleberry