On Lockdown – First Grade by Emily Pérez
by Wayne Miller
Hi, I’m Wayne Miller. I’m a poet who lives in Denver, Colorado, and I’m here for Poets on the Plains.
Today I’m going to read a poem by the poet Emily Pérez.
Pérez grew up in Weslaco, Texas, just a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. She studied at Stanford and the University of Houston before settling in Denver, where she works as a high school teacher and grade-level dean and lives with her husband and their two boys.
Pérez coedited the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and she has published two full-length poetry collections. The first, House of Sugar, House of Stone, views contemporary life—and particularly contemporary domestic life—through the lens of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
The second, What Flies Want, is less mediated, more direct, and thinks prismatically about the experience of raising boys in the context of gun violence, sexual violence, and a divided America. The poems inhabit that place where the relatively private, domestic world of parenthood makes contact with the historical moment and its cultural complexities—a place parents must always attend to, and a place over which parents can assert only the most limited control.
Though Pérez isn’t typically described as a formalist poet—she’s not regular writing sonnets or villanelles or other fixed forms—her poems employ a diversity of formal techniques, including regular repetition and subtle rhyme. I consider her poems to be formally inventive and I find them fascinating and compelling.
The poem I’d like to feature today is called “Lockdown, 1st Grade.” It’s a monologue in the voice of a child speaking to his mother about his day at school, and it gets much of its emotional power from dramatic irony—meaning that we the listeners (including the mother) understand more than the boy does about the situation he’s experienced. His innocence is—at least for me—heartbreaking.
Lockdown, 1st Grade Mom, we had to hide Mom, it was a game It wasn’t like a normal game The man outside was hunting The man outside was seeking The teacher turned out all the lights and we did hugs and bubbles Hugs around ourselves and bubbles in our mouths We could not let them pop We did not make a peep We curled up just like this in balls beside the cubbies We were chickens in a nest no we were babies in their eggs We watched the crack under the door to see his feet We listened for his legs to walk And when we heard we held our breath We held it for a long time It wasn’t like the last time The teacher told us if we won we’d get a prize we’d celebrate But she forgot and we just got to breathe
Emily Pérez from What Flies Want
(University of Iowa Press, 2022)
This poem is deceptively simple. It sounds all the way through like a real child talking. But, of course, it’s not a child talking. Pérez has created a believable and compelling child’s voice through careful word choices, short sentences, and a consistent attention to tone.
As I mentioned earlier, Pérez is a high school teacher and thus has also regularly gone through these lockdown drills just like her children have. She knows the experience. But in this poem she chooses to experience a lockdown drill not through her own eyes but through the eyes of a young child—whose perspective is so much more limited, and who has even less agency in a lockdown situation than an adult would have.
The result depicts a world that is entirely beyond the child’s control and, just as important, beyond our control. We can’t help the child—we’re not even there in the school when the lockdown is happening. The child is at the mercy of the adults around him, including the hunter. He doesn’t, in the end, even get to receive the prize his teacher promised. What he does get, however, is the most basic thing we can want for him, or for anyone, in the context of regular school shootings and gun violence. He gets to breathe.
I’m Wayne Miller. Thanks for listening.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
WAYNE MILLER (b. 1976) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025). His awards include the Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright to Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr Press, 2015)—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He lives in Denver, where he teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits the journal Copper Nickel. http://waynemillerpoet.com/
FEATURED POET
EMILY PÉREZ (b. 1976) is the author of two poetry collections: House of Sugar, House of Stone (Center for Literary Publishing, 2016) and What Flies Want (University of Iowa Press, 2022), which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. her work has appeared in periodicals such as The Guardian, The Georgia Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Rhino, and she has received grants and scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, and Jack Straw Writers. She lives in Denver and works as a high school teacher and grade-level dean. Read more at https://emilyperez.org/poems-and-essays-online or
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/laura-hershey
