Marina
Julia Friedman
Somehow the goddess of sea and sky
found her way into my mother’s needles
prodding indigo and lavender wool
into Iris’s portrait. Specks of yellow
illuminate her purple lips, striped
with azure in a trinity of petals
outlined in felt. She must have known
my mother’s name means for the sea
though her mind is mostly in the sky,
and pinning it down onto canvases
with scraggly fibers and silver frames,
like the rooted iris along the riverbanks,
its slender leaves and cobalt buds
reaching toward the heavens.
Julia Friedman received her MA in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University of Israel and currently serves as Editorial Manager at the medical journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection. Her work has appeared in Hermeneutic Chaos and Adanna Literary Journal.