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

from PYROLOGY // an account(ing)*

Ticking, like the stone clocks under every mountain. Breaking, like moonlight through someone else’s beige blinds. A hum, hard to place.²

1991 – Mount Pinatubo;
1980 – Mount St. Helens;
1912 – Novarupta;
1902 – Santa María;
1886 – Mount Tarawera;
1883 – Krakatoa;
1835 – Cosigüina;
1815 – Mount Tambora;
1783 – Grímsvötn;
1650 – Kolumbo, Santorini;
1600 – Kuaynaputina;
1580 – Billy Mitchell;
1477 – Bárðarbunga;
1452 – Kuwae;
1280 – Quilotoa.

2 It doesn’t do any good to remember the exact smoothness of your shoulder; but it snowed last night and my room is cold.

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.