“Time to check out,” I tell myself, looking at sailboats and surfers from the open window of my hotel room. I inhale minty incense and gaze down on a dark-skinned woman in a sombrero beneath towering palm trees. Laid out before her on a folding table ar

Nearby a figure wearing a long coat has just walked into the water.

We were busy painting pictures of False Hope on the face of Reality. Tattoos really. But they faded with time. And I now know this: Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. I saw an older writer in a slouched-down Fedora, gray beard and long sc

Did we ever walk together long?We walked apart much longer. Are we the same, unsaid, Or more different than you imagined? Are you amazed I still stand, Here and in this room, So brazen to show my lined, scarred face, So bold to live and speak aloud? Can you…

I remember a painting of a young girl (this could have been me) who had just given birth. She was almost smiling while she slept. Her upper lip was violet with exhaustion. One hand left up behind her head where it was thrown during the exertion of birth

We came wind-milling together ,up and over the blue and yellow stone bluffs, like a couple of empty yet racing nowhere fast plastic grocery bags, catching onto everything and anything in our way, and desperately trying to get free again,…

Staring at my $10 All Star Breakfast with extra bacon

In the cafeteria we have the cheese fries. Sara's favorite. She eats with two fingers, pinching like a crane. Cheese drips and she licks the fingers. She licks the plate. She goes for it. Big Lulu, the cook, calls from the back. “That's what I like to…

Jeff was unlucky.His first wife had been killed by his stalker a few years ago. When he first explained it to me, I had felt incredulous. Then I felt somewhat guilty for wondering who on earth would have been inspired to stalk him. The dead wife thing made me feel even…

What you have just experienced is an entertainment of a new type, one made possible by a convergence of the latest advances in pharmacology and technology.

I crossed the river Styx. I had two coins for my eyes. When I arrived on the other side I saw Johnny Depp, Neil Young and Jim Morrison.

nothing. But it could be something. I don't know. We'd probably have to agree on at least one thing for it to turn around and face us. Then it would have to be named, set free. We could watch it fly away together. That's a portend to…

And they let the angels out at twilight, the dark twins of bats, and their troubled undersides. Never were the bats so disturbed. Never until now has true evil been so see-through, and clear.

On October 14, 2009 Oriana Morosini appeared as the guest author on America’s most popular live television book show: The Author Answers

growing up fumbling for excuses your fingers, clumsy littlepads of flesh you don't recognize a scatter plot of acnethat won't erase by mirrorwhy this scene doesn't workkissing the detachable lips of bobby-soxed methodgirlswho keep…