Showing posts with label Literary Poetry. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2026

The Glass Behind Your Eyes / Literary Poem

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.

Visit Olivia Salter’s Author Page at Amazon.

https://amzn.to/4eddiV5

No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the author.

Monday, May 5, 2025

When Death Knocks Twice and You Refuse to Answer by Olivia Salter / Literary Poetry

When Death Knocks Twice and You Refuse to Answer

By Olivia Salter

Word Count: 397

The first time, he came as a whisper.

A floorboard sighed beneath unseen weight. A shadow lingered just beyond the corner of my eye.

I told myself it was only the wind.

But the wind doesn't breathe your name.

I turned my face toward the sun, its warmth settling softly across my skin.

"I'm not done," I said, fingers curled around the pulse of an ordinary morning—

my laughter still wandering the hallway,

a packet of garden seeds waiting on the kitchen table for spring.

He left without protest.

Only a glance—

not cruel, not kind—

as though he already knew we would meet again.

And we did.

He returned not as a shadow, but in reflections.

In the gray beneath my eyes.

In my mother's hand, shaking as she passed me the salt.

In the empty chair that no one moved afterward.

In the silence pressing against my ribs while the world kept insisting on tomorrow.

Then he knocked again.

Harder.

This time, he came carrying names.

Jerome.

Aunt Vi.

The tiny heartbeat that disappeared before we could learn who they might have become.

I stood my ground.

Not with anger.

Not with defiance.

With purpose.

"The ink is still wet, and the garden is still waiting," I said.

"There are seeds that haven't broken the earth.

There is a garden still asking for my hands.

There's someone I have yet to forgive for leaving without goodbye.

And a prayer I still owe my father before the shadows stretch too long."

Death listened.

He waited.

Then he turned and walked away.

No slammed door.

No judgment.

Only the sound of my own breathing,

steady enough to fill the room like a promise.

So I remained—

anchored by pulse and purpose.

Holding on, not because I feared dying,

but because unfinished love was still putting down roots beneath my skin.

Each morning, I rise.

I kneel where the earth waits.

I pull stubborn weeds.

I tuck hope between rows of tomatoes and marigolds.

I carry memory like smooth river stones in my pockets—

not to weigh me down, but to remember the road still calling.

When Death knocks again,

he'll find me with dirt beneath my nails,

the scent of rain clinging to my clothes,

hands deep in the soil,

growing something that will outlive me—

and I won't even cross the room to answer the door.

Visit Olivia Salter’s Author Page at Amazon.

No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the author.

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Saturday, July 18, 2026