Sarah Louise Garrido, faithful error: poems

 

NOW

Now the hardest part: exquisite second bloom,
the roses suddenly reviving. 

I turn to show you another
sunset trembling the sky
into fiery orange, and bright pink, 

sunset I want to put in your eye. 

Open the sockets again,
see the things I see. 

But the phone rings by mistake.
Onslaught of dust, stacks of belongings,
you in the chair, now not, a missing
litany of questions, driving soundlessly by the static sea. 

The hardest part does not cease, but lessens by danger.

Now: sparrows swooping into any here without you,
now not knowing what you would finally say. 

I was curious to see San Francisco Bay-area poet and creative director Sarah Louise Garrido’s full-length poetry debut, faithful error: poems (Fort Collins, CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2026), an assemblage of first-person observational narratives that occasionally lean into the metaphysical. “Joy withers away from the sons of man.” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “THE BIRDS HAVE NEVER FAILED ME, PART 1,” “All that’s left is this happiness I have // here with you. All I’ve ever wanted. / Of course I want this. // We don’t know what we want. / Rains come, and we rejoice.” Arranged in four numbered sections—“WANT FOR NOTHING,” “FEEL FREE,” “FOR THE TAKING” and “A FRUIT COMPELLED”—her titles set themselves as poem-anchors, solidifying a narrative that might not wander per se, but moves free along the ground laid down by that title-tether, stretching out and through, but held to each poem’s signpost.

One might suggest this a book of perspectives, set in lyric narratives, Garrido writes of questions and attention, sure, in day-book journal poems perpetually composed around and towards an unseen “you” against the negotiations and interiorities of this nameless narrator. Through Garrido’s poems, there is always a perspective being offered; a speaker, and someone external being spoken to. Not merely declarations or documented thoughts but a kind of directed speech. Even the opening of the rhetorical lyric of “THE COLD LORD,” that begins: “O lord, / if you would but bruise, / batter my body / under the mass of stars, // I’d know you are.” It is as though each of these poems, the narrator requires another character for the sake of counterpointing her perspectives and narratives, such as the poem “YOUR LOSS” begins, opening:

Absence of birdsong in your backyard,
cloud strands not quite making it
into any form. A year of unrealizeds. 

For example, my daughter cannot swim;
the last time she tried was before everything shut down,
my swelling body and her baby-fat arms under the moon. 

My son does not understand
the look on your face, your words. 

Waving at your husband
through the glass, I’m at a loss, 

your loss. A year of windows,
trapped behind solid surfaces—
nothing to do but wait
for you to emerge beyond skin, 

taking on light, finally
the form you always were.