Ode to the Senate by Nicole LeFavour, Idaho State Senator, D

O Idaho Senate with your flourishes
Your contemplative strength
How the House has teeth so much sharper

O Senate with your kind men and tough women
You strut as if these endings were your making
Why do you own acts so cruel?

For in your faces lies a sadness, in your eyes aquifers rise
The blood of a million and a half lives hangs around you
Will you listen to its cry?

O Senate your demons are the sly ones
Men with voices more self righteous than mine

My death here will not come from honored stabbing
But from from friendly fire 
From cold flesh cut to keep me small

O Senate in your back-hall offices the lobbyists tarry
They covet your small numbers 
Your love of fine wine and red meat

Let none come here to lead you into darkness
Your voice is that of orphans
Their quest is yours to represent

As a body of the legislature, Senate you demur to Gwartney and his Governor too often
The scent of moneyed scandals rise and yet you dally
Steel your bones, we've battles yet to fight

Your skin pales at my words, still you compliment my passion
I could stay to study at your gleaming heels
But my tolerance for pain fades with age

Aye, in your finance committee lie secret angels
In your gruff leaders hide impish saints
Faces of stone, you weep when the hero falters

Nay, I'd thought to leave but have grown fond now
Thorn in your steely side, such a view you offer
The space you give, the lines you've begged me learn

Should I miss the house? Yes
I shall wander East and visit
Gaze fondly at their casual dance and return

I'll run here to your pools of formal kindness
The body of thirty-five parts which together spin a brilliant, hard and haunted heart.

Melapona Maidens

by Jordan Burns

I hear there’s vanilla bean down in Mexico,

 a vining orchid mass of fat green tubes

 that bulge and twist like ear parts.

Vanilla planifola in dead words.

bean plants grow slow and specific – they take nine months,

like me, and then it’s April.

thick gold dust aches only for the Melipona bee, but who can wait for the one?

 a soul-mate is a risky thing.

people with dark hair and skin and lips

 don’t wait it out;

instead they know to hand-woo those

vanilla maidens. There are secrets:

a stem of grass to lift the flower flaps;

a tiny touch to coax the parts;

a modest eye to behold

the hug of pollen grains on swollen stigma – Careful, always careful.

then some beans are popped

open for the flavor in the syrup that leaks

onto harvest fingers – red-black, like deep-gut blood.

secrets don’t drip, they spill.

other beans are cured to fetch a better price: first they know to drop

the slender pods in pots of rolling boils.

the searing water kills any

vegetating flesh. Then they leave them

 outside, trapped inside

tight wool wraps for ten sun-burned days.

and they sweat and sweat –

like summer journeys in my desert home, on dry mesas,

when my heart beats secret fevers to my skin

 and I can’t escape the hot-cloud hanging from my head.

becoming is the same for everything.

they sweat until they’re ready. Now they smell like vanilla, and taste like it.

and, so their vanilla souls won’t rot,

 the people know to dry them in the white noon heat,

 until the long bean fingers grow

 raisin-dark and wrinkled,

 their secrets shrivel like shrunken heads,

and they clack like ropes when sold in black bunches.

I hear crops often fail,

for sometimes hands aren’t quick enough and visions are too big.

the seasons are tireless.

I don’t know vining bean forests,

 or Mexico sun,

 or Spanish, or the Melipona bee –

I’ll never have more

 than one native tongue.

but I hear bursting, and sweating, and shriveling –  

whispers loud and deep in my ear:

I must know a little vanilla language.