Amy Holman

THE STAINLESS STEEL WALLET

This is the wallet
with a hand as smooth as silk
and the strength that surpasses leather.

This is the man
as smooth as silk with the strength
that erases the other. Thinner than paper,

he's of architecture
and rocket, built to withstand
intrusion and hide behind conjecture.

She feels like pulp,
stripped bark and boiling bath.
She is the lecture on faith and embrace

of tears that cannot
change his mettle. She is at fault
for misunderstanding his range: strippers

are sought to be flayed,
others to be stained and stripped
of esteem. This is the one that maintained

his cover as stainless.
Her dream was easy to steal.


Amy reads "The Stainless Steel Wallet":



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Amy confesses: "This poem is one part Hammacher Schlemmer catalog copy, and one part celebrity news. When I wrote it, Sandra Bullock was coming off the high of winning an Oscar, and crediting her supportive, loving husband, and the low of being publicly humiliated by Jesse James' numerous affairs with strippers."

AMY HOLMAN is a poet and literary consultant, primarily, who also write essays and a little bit of fiction. I have four published chapbooks, including the prize-winning Wait for Me, I'm Gone, from Dream Horse Press, and a full-length collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window, from Somondoco Press. Poems have been most recently in The Potomac Review, The Same, New Verse News, and Zocalo Public Square.