Inside A Toorak Flower Shop
Shari Kocher (University of Melbourne, Australia)
.
.
you point
to some cold
hellishly white
labial lilies
in lily-white paper
pintucks
in grey linen
iron-pressed
a steely sharp
edgy narrow
lit-lit room
so straight and proper-
ly polite
.
you feel the floor
shrivel under your feet
as if you’d died
without noticing
and ended up
here
buying odourless lilies
from a wallet that opens
and falls
like water
.
as she folds and folds
the floral
paper
cutting the string
with her teeth.
.
.
Shari Kocher has lived in many places, including Dublin, and now resides between the Yarra Valley and Melbourne where she is undertaking a Masters in Creative Writing at Melbourne University. Her work has been published in various journals including Blue Dog, Famous Reporter and Overland, and in 2002 she was the winner of the UNE Literary Award (Open Poetry Section) for her sequence poem ‘Unborn Child’. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.
