Priego's "Face Masks" starts with a question that sounds practical and turns out to be larger. "The question these mornings of birdsong / to wear a mask or not" has the shape of Hamlet's famous dilemma, and the echo is probably deliberate. The birdsong sets a quiet, almost pastoral scene, and the poem then fills it with the awkward business of working from home. Judging by the references to masks, video meetings and "the disease", the poem seems to be set during a pandemic. Its real subject is the other masks we wear, the ones that stay on when the illness is "something else".
The poem's central idea is that professional life depends on pretending that private life doesn't exist. Remote work briefly broke that pretence. The image of "intimacy inside out / like a glove" captures it well. A glove turned inside out shows its lining, the part meant to stay hidden. Home has been turned inside out in the same way, and colleagues can now see living rooms, children and clutter. The poem then asks whether we will "go back / without pretending / there's no life back home". Here "back home" seems to mean that the office, by contrast, is a place where domestic life has been scrubbed out.
The poem's most inventive stretch imagines that scrubbing as a kind of travel. The commute becomes "space travel", with "the atmosphere of the real left behind". Then comes a list of everything the office erases: "no crying children, no flushing toilets, / no hammering next door / no washing up, no clothes drying". The repeated "no" works like a roll call of the ordinary. Each item is small, noisy and human, and the stacked negatives make the office sound sterile, like an airless capsule.
Virtual backgrounds are the next stage of that erasure. "Last year's hols behind the blue screen" is a fine detail, because the holiday is a fake, borrowed from the past and pasted over the present. Against it the poem sets "that poor chap's dancing kids and / hurrying stressed-out wife", the moment when real life breaks through the screen. The tone here is gently comic, though "poor chap" is a little condescending, and the wife is described only by her hurry and stress. The parenthesis "(the office worker has no clothes)" echoes the fairy tale of the emperor's new clothes. In that story everyone pretends not to see the truth, and here the truth is that the whole performance of office professionalism is a bit of make-believe.
The structure supports all this. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, apart from a colon after "working from home" and a dash after "after this". Lines run on without stopping, as if one thought were tumbling into the next, and the lower-case, conversational voice, with British touches like "hols" and "chap", keeps it informal. The rhythm changes near the end. "zoom in, skype me, hang out / make believe, do something else / mute the mic, camera off" is a run of short imperatives. Brand names turn into verbs, and ordinary phrases like "hang out" take on a screen-based meaning. "Make believe" sits in the middle of the tech vocabulary and quietly names what is going on. "Zoom in" can also be read as an instruction to look more closely, which is what the poem itself is doing. Muting the microphone and switching off the camera are small acts of concealment, close cousins of putting on a mask.
The last two lines make the link explicit: "what masks we are used to wearing / when the disease is something else". The phrase "used to" matters. It suggests the masks are old habits, long predating any health measure. "Something else" is deliberately open, and the poem doesn't say what the disease is. Possibly it means the pressure to hide, or the gap between public and private selves.
This is why the poem matters. It takes a very recent set of objects, masks, webcams and blue screens, and uses them to ask an old question about authenticity. It doesn't lecture. It lets a list of noises and a few well-chosen images do the work, and it leaves readers to decide whether they want to go back to the airless capsule.