—The Book of Ruth Back to Moab? Not a chance. I didn’t marry an outsider for nothing, didn’t sign on to start again ten years older, husbandless, childless, out of my fortune. Yes, I’d choose her again—shrewd Naomi, always the brains of the outfit. Who else ever asked what I wanted? And she knew a good deal when she saw it. I never told anyone before, not even God, but it wasn’t hard to forsake my gods for hers. To me they were all the same, men giving orders. We were in cahoots, two women, though Naomi dreamed up the plan, pimped me out to a gentle old man who called me daughter. That was risky, but wasn’t it a time to be bold and wild, with the weather changing, and the fields almost bare? Don’t lie at my feet like a slave, he said, lifting me in his papery arms. What did I want? A child. I love you, he said, but not like that. I could ruin you. You won’t, I said. So we married, in the proper way— papers signed, property redeemed. Old as he was, he gave us the child. Then he died. That marriage was lucky in two ways. First, the grandfather of King David got to be born, and to an alien. It strengthened the gene pool. Second, he got to grow up in a house of women.
Susan Zimmerman’s chapbook, Nothing is Lost, was published by Caitlin Press in 1980. Her poems have been published in periodicals such as Room, Fiddlehead, The Ontario Review, Fireweed, Matrix, and Calyx, and in the anthologies Landscape, Writing Right, and The Third Taboo.
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