A girl, wearing an Easter dress, picks dandelions in a field while villagers torch a church. A bishop with a noose around his neck, sits on a white mare under an elm. A man in a large-brimmed hat grips the horse’s reins while another dressed in a red tunic tosses the rope over a thick limb. Standing next to the girl, Death fists a bouquet in his skeletal right hand. His left rests on his brown hood, which is cocked downward as if anxiously scanning the Timothy for the scythe he haphazardly laid down and now can’t seem to find.
Ekphrasis for a Painting that Does Not Exist
The Massachusetts Beat Poet Laureate (2025-2027), Joshua Michael Stewart, is the author of four previous collections of poetry: Break Every String (Hedgerow Books, 2016), The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums (Human Error Publishing, 2020), Love Something (Main Street Rag, 2022), and Welcome Home, Russell Edson (Soft Shoe Press, 2024). His work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Rattle, New Flash Fiction Review, Mystery Tribune, Best Small Fictions 2025, and in many others. Visit him at https://joshuamichaelstewartauthor.com