God, Who Gives These Young Men Guns?

When I talk to God
I use masculine pronouns –
I hate to admit it.

Maybe because God
allowed twenty first-graders
to be slaughtered in school
in a town near mine,
while I was in the Stop & Shop
probably squeezing plums.

Ten years ago.

Who gives all these young men guns?
If God were a mother,
I don’t think She would do it.

*

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer who finds herself writing poetry in response to today’s world—personal, national, and global. Her fiction has won the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, the William Saroyan Centennial Prize, the Lilith short story contest, and the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poem “No Mention” recently won third prize in the Voices of Israel Reuben Rose Poetry Competition.