Elizabeth Howkins The Pillow Book Her thoughts, secret as winter roots, sleep like snails beneath her head. Moonmoths flutter in their chrysalis of wood. Sentences etched out carefully with the quill of her dreams draw a picture paint a triptych a life an unfulfilled wish held like a cold hard tablet of bone beneath the tongue. With a calligrapher’s brush she draws the shape of her desire on the lover’s glistening torso and locks the tale beneath her pillow with women’s things: yearning loss unspeakable regret and half-developed photographs torn down the middle. Year after year the story lengthens. The letters flutter like butterflies beneath her head. The words curved into hooks. The sentences curl and hiss like snakes. She writes faster and faster, waiting for a life to clarify itself into the shape of a blossom the shape of a tongue, secrets piling up like skulls, tears marking the pages staining them. As she writes, the lines fill up with phantoms, until no unused pages remain. Taproot Literary Review published this poem in 1998.