The Glass Behind Your Eyes / Literary Poem

The

The Glass Behind Your Eyes

By

Olivia Salter

I enter buildings that forget my face

before the doors finish closing.

Glass decides what is real enough to remain,

a filter between the world and me.

Air passes through—

a rumor of presence.

My badge clicks—once—

a sound small enough

to be mistaken for consent.

My voice is measured

before it becomes mine.

Outside, the world keeps its distance.

A siren threads red through traffic.

A woman tightens her grip on her purse,

and I am the reason why.

I watch her knuckles whiten—

an old, tired signal.

I am the ghost she has been taught to fear,

and I have become the expert

at staying transparent,

at making myself smaller than the space I occupy.

Tell me—

is this not the same air in your lungs?

Does it not move through you cleanly,

unquestioned?

I learned early: innocence is a luxury

that can be taken.

At eleven, I stopped running—

joy made me too visible.

At fifteen, I learned to hold my breath

so my body would not be mistaken

for a weapon.

At twenty, I learned

that safety and understanding

are strangers who never meet.

Now I move through rooms

like a sentence corrected

before I can even finish it.

At the store, I am followed—

a question that refuses to resolve.

In meetings, my words arrive intact

but leave with their meaning replaced.

And still—you say we are the same.

Then do not glance.

Look.

Not past me. Not through me.

At the dense, pulse-driven, undeniable fact of me.

My throat burns to scream—

to shatter the glass you have installed behind your eyes

to decide what is real.

I am done being a ghost you can see through.

I am not your curriculum of trauma.

I am not your penance.

I am bone. I am blood. I am breath.

I am a Name.

The God I was taught to trust

whispered of grace over Sunday dinner,

before I knew you would turn the pews into a barricade—

using the same scripture to search me,

to strip me down,

until the explanation becomes my erasure.

So I keep moving—

through doors that shift,

through conversations that revise me,

through mornings that demand my survival

but deny my arrival.

And still—I remain.

Not as proof.

Not as an endurance test for your conscience.

I am the thing that refuses

to be weighed by your hand.

So say it, if you need to:

Say I am excess.

Say I am error.

But look at how your own denial hesitates—

your tongue remembering

what it tries to kill.

You have already seen me.

And what is seen

does not disappear

without burning a hole in the air.

I will not ask again.

I stand where you keep misplacing me.

I do not wait for your eyes to adjust.

I am not missing.

I am here.

And I am still breathing.