It will probably happen when I’m at work, and he recruits

a nosy, but caring friend with an AI-powered search engine.

They’ll hush behind a grandfather tree two boys wide

as they enter the name found in the baby book

sticky with years of unopened pages. All four parts of it

with umlauts over the last two vowels. He’ll try it all on,

the same way he tried on his lolo’s shoes when he was a toddler,

already rushing across my floor as men do. He will zoom in

on satellite imagery of the places his father chose to make a life in,

a trail of unclosed tabs with mountains of surprising depth

and a pixelated green.

~
Bio: Angelica Recierdo is the author of the chapbook, One Last Ripe Life (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and an editor at Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. Angelica earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Dominican University of California. She was a finalist for the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize, the San Francisco Writers Conference Writing Contest, and the Asbury Book Cooperative Poetry Contest. Angelica is a 2026 Best New Poets Nominee.