In Short –  Issue 2 (Winter 2025)

January 31, 2025

Image credit: Camille Rimbawa

I ask my daughter about the armed shooter drill at her middle school

By Holly Karapetkova

I worry. She’s not terribly communicative, so when I get the boilerplate email the school sends out I ask how it was, as I’ve done every year since kindergarten. It’s her first year in middle school and for once she’s not upset. She’s laughing. No, it wasn’t frightening. Everyone just makes jokes. No one listens and the teachers try to get us to be quiet. It’s really funny. Not the answer I’m expecting, but at least she isn’t anxious, and I’m unsure how to respond to this generation of kids who’ve grown up with Parkland and Uvalde. It IS funny she says, still laughing. We know locking the door and sitting in the dark won’t save us. Now I’m listening. I ask about the nightmares. We both know which ones I mean—the ones where she’s running through the school hallways while a faceless body chases after her with a gun. She nods. I sometimes make it outside the school, she tells me, and I run to hide under a bus—but in the dreams they always get you. She sees my face and stops. Shrugs. It’s okay mom, she says, as if suddenly I’m the one who needs to be comforted, me and all the other parents who feel helpless to protect our children, though the solution is as obvious as the meaning of her dream, this warped logic no one escapes. 

Holly Karapetkova (she/her) is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work with young poets. She is the author of three books of poetry, Dear Empire (Gunpowder Press), winner of the 2025 William Meredith Prize and the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize; Towline (Cloudbank Books), winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize; and Words We Might One Day Say, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Prize for Poetry.