The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Chelsea Biondolillo's "Ologies"

NECROLOGY // raccoon, pronghorn, mule deer, ring-necked pheasant, fox

I’m sorry for driving past and driving past and driving past all winter and into spring, and for watching, with interest—even, I’m ashamed to say, a kind of gross curiosity—as you became less and less of what you were, as you were ground down by innumerable tires into bone, fur, and dirt, as you were picked apart by magpies and crows.

I would like to be the kind of person who looks away from the slumped backbone, the twisted leg, the handful of feathers, flickering without flight in the gusts of dusty farm-to-market traffic. But I’m afraid I’ll always stare.

This selection comes from Chelsea Biondolillo’s chapbook Ologies, available from Etchings Press. Purchase your copy here!

Chelsea Biondolillo‘s work has appeared in Orion, Sonora Review, Passages North, Brevity, River Teeth, Hayden’s Ferry Review and others. Her chapbook, Ologies, features “Phrenology,” a notable selection in Best American Essays 2014 and “How to Skin a Bird,” which won Shenandoah‘s Carter Prize for the Essay. She has an MFA in creative writing and environmental studies from the University of Wyoming and is currently at work on a book about vultures.

A recipient of a 2015 NEA Fellowship for poetry, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Staci R. Schoenfeld’s poems appear in or are forthcoming from Washington Square, Mid-American Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Muzzle, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. She is a PhD student at the University of South Dakota.