by Kelley White
Philadelphia toddler dies after shooting herself in the eye with father’s unsecured gun: police. —New York Post, April 8, 2024
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But I don’t want to give her name or the specifics of her case. I don’t want to invade her family’s privacy. They have already suffered more than I can imagine. Worse, I’m a grandmother, I can imagine it. Have imagined it. Have seen other children shot. So many. Too many. I will not list their names or ages only, imagine, this one shot by his brother over a video game, this one shot by his friend during a game of spin-the-bottle, this one ‘playing,’ this one angry for a moment. This one whose grandmother claimed the gun was safe. Oh, my dear ones how much I imagine. I see your five year old hands wrapped around the barrel. I see the gun tossed casually on a couch cushion, the gun left on top of the refrigerator. The gun on the dashboard of the abandoned car. I hear the shots, sometimes, when I leave the clinic for lunch. I see the crossing guard so careful with her charges at the school just down the road. I see the children’s faces. Their hands on a trigger, my own old empty hands.
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Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in Philadelphia and New Hampshire. Poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) Recipient of 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant she is Poet in Residence at Drexel’s Medical School. Her newest collection, No. Hope Street, was recently published by Kelsay Books.
Stunning, shocking, American ... guns ... send this to all the Senators, the Congresspeople who remain blind & deaf to events like this ... what would it take? what does it take? more massacres? Am somewhat speechless