Nancy Naomi Carlson   SUBTITLES .........Language is primarily so much air... ...................--Anthony Burgess We read the shapes of lips as they frame each mouthful of air-- the taut pull crisping sound or the rounded pout, meaning twisted into patterns that take on a familiar slant. Eyebrows arch and drop, ride the curves of inflection. When the timing is off, words appear before they are spoken. Some sounds run on as if from underwater, meaning rising to the surface with an instinct to survive. Feeling amplifies the steady beat, beat of idea that opens to a human voice transposed to fit any key.   SELLE DE LA VEAU A LA TOSCA Picture braised, sliced veal loins purloined from the bone and restored, laid over a bed of cut pasta with truffles and cream-- did I mention the sauce Mornay?--for queen or diva a fitting tribute, or the perfect dish for the prelude to a tryst set, let's say, in Rome against the ruins, or Palazzo Farnese, or maybe the Tiber, sweat beading on our sunburned flesh like rain on an apple, golden and delicious, rare and forbidden, each bite's aftertaste another hunger, a scene glazed like raku, hot from the kiln--sapphire sky, white crests of a river out of control, an overflow, an other-worldly tint-- Sant'Andrea della Valle bells tolling, veristic pitch.   SARI-COVERED NIGHTS I'm a brass-bellied Buddha's dream, an evening of gauze, stars blue and windswept, the quicksilver moon tangled in the limbs of a lone banyan tree. Oh rub me to a blinding sheen! I am the sitar's ragged throat, pitched between here and when, caught in quartertones, worlds bewitched. Why these four arms so long unkissed! Am I not your goddess? My five mouths roll their uvulas, guttural as high winds crossing desert dunes. Is there not a stopping place for us, adrift, two souls who speak in tongues? Stevens Carter The Embrace see more work by Stevens Carter   THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IS AND MISS Untethered in a sea of sound, words before they root themselves into daily speech insinuate meaning through the shape of lips, the exploration of tongues-- sibilants hissing danger, stops stanching the flow. Neither shush nor shoo, sheesh combines secret with outrage, speech with a twist, or screech when the direction is wrong. Godzillion surpasses what cannot be grasped, hard to hold as hawthorn, thornbill or magpie; fried marbles, their cat's eyes sizzled, frozen until centers cracked. So many ways glass can splinter without coming apart, each ray of light taking a new turn. Animal grafts to mineral in foxglove and wormwood. Mutations arise from vowel shifts or consonants dropped back into a pool like fish too small to hold a place, or chromosomes that miss their acrobatic linkages (no safety net spotting below).     TRANSLATING MYSELF ........................Elle allait sur la pointe de ses pieds nus...elle s'abbattait ........................contre sa poitrine, avec un long frisson. ..................................--Gustave Flaubert Aveling's Bovary comes to Leon barefooted, but Russell's Bovary tiptoes on bare feet. The difference begs definition. A double supplication-- pieds nus losing truth in the twice translated, like a copperhead shedding its skins. Tell me the perfect words to bring me to you-- as if perfect were not petals of abstraction, white and unknowable, but the fruit of here and now, thick and earthy, weighing down the tongue. Would you have me come in well-heeled pumps or spiked heels, wobbly and drunk? Sneakers padding the floor, laces trailing like adders? Or stripped to essentials--flesh and bone. But barefooted or on bare feet? Bare feet seem too plodding, since I would be light footed and running toward you. But would I throw myself upon your breast with a long shudder, swooping like a tern, wings beating against her own dazed reflection, or sink into your arms with an equally long shudder? No, if I were to sink, it would be into the green pool of your eyes--more of a resurfacing, an emerging from the long cocoon of longing. A dipping, as a taper that grows, or a plating of gold, or a brioche brushed golden with yolk, devoured.     Nancy Naomi Carlson's work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The South Carolina Review, Chelsea, Puerto del Sol, and The Greensboro Review. Her collection of poetry, Kings Highway, won the 1997 Washington Writers' Publishing House competition, and Complications of the Heart won the 2002 Texas Review Press's Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Imperfect Seal of Lips was the winner of the 2005 Tennessee Chapbook Prize. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2003, 2004, and 2005, she currently is an associate editor for Tupelo Press and an instructor at The Writer's Center in Bethesda. Published in Volume 6, Number 3, Summer 2005.