Poem by Shannon O'Connor

Illustration by James Conant




Unbeautiful

She could have been one
of the wandering masses
muttering to herself
as the world ignored her,
the dirt at the bottom
of your shoes,
the muck at the bottom
of the pigpen -

She would have been one
of the nullified nobodies
three inches away
from living in a cardboard box
behind a Chinese restaurant,
scrounging meat off
discarded teriyaki chicken wings
that the beautiful
tossed away without thinking
of the unbeautiful -

She is the shell
of a scallop
small, indistinguishable,
unnoticeable to the sky,
the wind
the stars,
the rain,
untouchable, but they don’t
understand what she feels is
not in her head.