 On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Air Flight 370 vanished traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The days that followed did not provide any conclusive findings of a crash nor wreckage. News. A plane disappears from the sky carrying 239 people. An oil slick is all that skims the surface. Everyone holds their gasp. Where have they gone? Their spirits ride in the cumulus clouds coast along the silver horizon of the moon. Time passes, eyes mesmerized by lit up screens. A tennis ball, volleyed between two sweaty men who resemble gazelles in the white desert dust. The agony of waiting, friends and family are a trellis, supporting a vine laden with fruit, bodies of whispers, minds of water. A mosaic station pumps out the cure. I dreamt I was in love with you, strange as angels, just like a dream. The mythos burns off like the Pacifica fog. All that remains is the gilded breath of the tides. After Banu Kapil, dear love, endings are the coefficient of beginnings. I traveled to Scotland, responses in English, voices of women, birth, ancestry, residence. Forty years in this body of woman, how she moves through the day, inside her. I don't know, throbbing, plumb blossoms, honey. I write because I cannot paint. Drawing a bath, voluptuous oh. How to tell time with my body, it is winter, I don't open the window. Counting my in-breaths and my out-breaths per second minute than hour. Bird calls, the sky above New York is thick red. I wrote to you but you did not reply. I am trying to keep my heart open. This is my one jumping life. Fresh brown eggs, it is difficult to write about love. Lapsang Su Chang, the tea tastes of bark and wood smoke. Her body is not in one straight line. She will never tell him. Notes on being a nomad. There are no faces like yours in this country. The April morning you turned your face away from what you secretly loved and why. Because we can't take it in whole form. Writing is dangerous. And now the cantata begins, the gobbling silence, the fuchsia spikes of closed eyelids, dismembered kisses, arbitrary thirsts. I don't want to collect our stories anymore. Maybe Moss Beach, maybe Philadelphia. I loved him according to the law of 45s. Abrupt. I think of Rilke, that bright face inches from ore. I said no. I said yes, saying I can't. Sometimes you have to choose who you are, the only woman. The word lover is the same as a neatly folded manuscript you don't look at for a year. I always thought I'd marry in red, pink or orange. A crow begins to sing to his crow wife who lives on the other side of the city. Tonight she does not answer. It's true. I miss her letters arriving. Holding them between my fingertips like talismans. Clairvoyance. The body does not breathe in time. I want to make a book of looking. Everything that has happened, everything that will happen. 24 shapes of longing. The moonlight turns into pure red sun, and then the clouds, and then the earth. History of an outstretched arm. A paring knife in her right fist. The golden light in the trees. The inner skin inverted with its texture of overripe persimmons. The fruit falling off the bone. Her body open to air. Interiors to honor ellipsis. Interrogations become abstract. His questions grow eyes. How to live without expectation. How to travel light. How to let the earth go. How skin can see. This uncommon California rain that's falling as I write. The rain that reminds me. I am always facing the direction of water. It's rapidly dissolving salt. Rupa, I just love to all of your poems about history, our history and where we kind of come from. And so I've found that the circle of women that I'm in have been doing a lot of the same. So I'm Scottish-American, and I keep going back to Scotland. And so I've written a few poems that I'm trying to embody my family and maybe rewrite some of the stuff that I'm not sure about. And also, I keep going to places that I think I'm from, but I don't have any definitive proof. So it's something that's in my bones. So this one's called Air Loom. Oh, and this was also published in a fabulous online journal called Hot Tub Astronaut. That's the only reason why I apply. It was because of the name. As her belly swelled, she heard an opera. The waves crashed against the rocks and fury. The aria of war. Perhaps the geometry of her life unraveled. Love, pain, shame. The chronicle of bloodlines. Her clan lived in the same house for six generations. One son moved from the North Sea to the Pacific. Another lost his life on an oil rig in Aberdeen. Secrets barely audible. Perhaps the deep blue unfurled its long tongue, flicked it on the rocks, smacking lips, the snack of a snake. How unencumbered he was to take what he wanted from her small frame. History is an outstretched limb, hungry for expansion. Breathe into the tightness and feel your body open, a softening inside and out. When the sun no longer dazzles, we become elemental. Breath of wonder, pens of quartz, wet briny sapphire. To be woman, a spell. To be woman is like the cosmos of a dark sky. The steady rivulet of iridescent jewels strung up like ripe plums. I would like to be the kind of woman who is a model of patience, who is a sophisticated listener, who is a considerate mother, daughter, sister, friend. I would like to be the kind of woman who can both root and stretch, hold steady when the tornado blows. And so bring me your fear and I'll chew it. In return, I'll spit out your choice of dark chocolate or lemon macaroons. For I have no time for fear, I'm done of being scared and huddled behind the newspaper and the screen in a miniature cave. I've emerged fearless, so bring it to me, bring me your fear. Touch the light in my hands and eat something sweet. I absolve you of fear, say three purple rains and line the floor with rose petals. Grid your house with stones of significance. Sage yourself with the wilderness. Women, I ask you to chomp down on the truth. Jelly bean, fig, cheeseburger, peach. Climb out onto the balcony with all your succulents. Perhaps you'll see the Pacific or Mount Shasta or the Mojave. Throw out whatever no longer serves you and live. So I also have a very... I'm still working on this, but it's a very new poem that is for my bestie who's here sitting with my daughter, Jennifer. And I'll just read it. What's hidden for Jennifer and also for Philip T. Nails and his objectifying gaze poem. Just give into it. Just give into the guilty pleasures, she says. I'm in the driver's seat confessional booth as we plummet over Goff Street. I bestow my car stereo to Mariah. The fragile piano keys cling as she hummingly laments her departed lover because in simple unpoetic terms we belong together. Because when babyface comes on the radio, we belong together. The angels are resonating through her lyrics, feathered wings abound, transmitted by the Spotify gods. Don't tell anyone I love this song, especially the DJs. Guilty pleasures were once inside that empty package on the bedroom floor. The taste bud carnival roars through the minty Oreo parade that embalms my mouth. I have what my friend would call a resolute objectifying gaze that has been gawkishly hawkishly staring at men and spandex lycra. Whatever you want to call it for the last 10 years, tight fitted cyclists pump their tree trunk thighs. I'm certain my third eye is burning a hole through the back of his ass right now, watching the tattoos move up and down the mid-calf as it circles around hypnotized. And yeah, I read all those Fifty Shades books. I ripped the cover off so no one knew what I was reading because this guilty pleasure was something that bordered on complete insanity. But I was insane. I was 50 pounds heavier and growing a baby inside my belly, so soft porn at 8.30 on the bar train. Yes, please. I still want to wiggle my toes in Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka hair and listen to You Killed My Father Prepare to Die in Nigo Montoya ad infinitum. And so here, in this driver's seat confessional, I release the judge in shame oblivion. I give you my guilty pleasures, accompanied by Panda Express orange chicken. It's okay to park in the drive-thru lane and lick your fingers. This is why you need the sisterhood. Let's see. My memories are stained with the familiar. They are not perfumed with silence. That's Justin Chin from his poem Imagining America. Dear Journal, Colonel of Remembrance, list of desires, chatter of a crowded mind, move cobwebs aside, push past the critics, excavate details, fruit flies in the empty kitchen, the house hushed without a toddler. I miss her high-pitched squeal as she squishes my face and hollers, teakle, teakle, teakle, while tickling my neck. The bowl of memory she splays herself on the dirty kitchen floor and yells, Mama, look I am octopus. I arrive here in the morning to scribble, to note the calamity of crows in the adjacent yard. I serve morsels of language, recite the swirls of black ink, record records of recollection. All the days are nights until I see thee, and the night's bright days when dreams do show thee me. That's our friend Willie Shakespeare, sonnet 43. Dear Sierra, you are the compass, you hand me round smooth stones as if they are precious jewels, masterful collector. Mama, can you hold these? I wash and I dry, awaited cash in my purse. The phone stays hidden. In Suzuki Roshi's slow motion, we reach for Legos, sticks, sand, puzzle pieces. I'm the baby bird and you are the mama bird, this love impenetrable. Weekend ice cream party, talk about Gerald and Piggy, best friends, color outside lines, a temporary tattoo, indelible rainbow heart. Thank you. I think that's probably good.