Two After José Francisco Borges, by Sue D. Burton

The Woman Who Stuffed the Devil into a Bottle

after A Mulher Que Botou O Diablo Na Garrafa, woodcut by José Francisco Borges (Brazil) contemporary
https://indigoarts.com/mulhere-que-botou-o-diabo-nagarrafa-0

Bigger than a wine bottle, he’s a sweet talker.
But he only wants to dance. His horns are yellow,
his tail grips a snake—its tongue  
forked like future tense.
She has on a red dress with white polka dots. 

Lots of polka dots. (The soft wood of the block
allows for cuts of fine detail.) She is smiling 
as she holds him over the mouth of the bottle. 
As she diminishes him.

**

The Girl Who Turned Into a Snake

She looks glum as she kneels before an even glummer priest, 
her body a long river from the waist down, 
undulating like a snake, like a snake that was once a river,
like a river that once snaked through the countryside,
contained now in snakeskin and story.
A horse with its long strange shadow of a body half-hidden  
by a tree, grins, wide-eyed, lascivious—am I reading 
too much into the plot?—and the priest, 
with his silly little hat and outline of a cross, such 
a young face, looks only at the horse, shadow horse
behind the tree. It’s his fate to be afraid 
of snakes. O Girl, O Cobra Girl, don't despair, 
be bold like the two blackbirds flying over your head 
and over the horse's head, away from the priest.
Bold and black like the river and your shimmering hair 
and the butterfly in the upper left corner.
 
Sue D. Burton

Sue D. Burton’s poetry appears in the just released anthology In the Footsteps of a Shadow: Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa (MadHat Press). She is the author of BOX (selected by Diane Seuss for the Two Sylvias Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2019 Vermont Book Award) and the book-length poem Little Steel (Fomite Press). She lives in Vermont and worked (retired now) for over twenty-five years as a physician assistant specializing in women’s health. She‘s done linoleum block prints for cards and banners and loves José Francisco Borges’s wild and wonderful woodcuts.