The Moon
September 22, 2024

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
As we continue our exploration of the tarot’s major arcana, this current issue looks at The Moon. One of the most elusive cards in the tarot, The Moon has always embodied change, mystery, the clandestine, and secrecy. It’s also a symbol of our fears, our vulnerabilities, and our shadow self. To some, facing these darker, shadowy aspects of ourselves can be frightening. For others, it’s exciting. No matter your response, though, it always requires vulnerability and openness.

That’s precisely what we get here in this selection of works. In Claudia Wysocky’s “Unfinished Exit”, a poem about absence and loss, I was struck by its confessional voice, its startling vulnerability, and its surprising imagery.

B.B. Pats gives us two non-fiction pieces and one fiction. Each provides a snapshot of an erotically charged encounter, brief and fleeting, capturing the way sex is imbued in and resonates throughout small moments of our lives. I also love their hybrid nature of non-fiction and fiction, with each piece never fully succumbing to either genre.

What you’ll also find is a series of poems from Kate Polak, each of which capture the voice of historic sex workers. There’s also Aisha Ali’s beautiful and heartbreaking poems “A Truce” and “Song of the Reformed People Pleaser.” I was also thoroughly surprised by Ashley Laurel’s poem cycle, presented in different “Acts”, for its raw and honest language, and startling imagery.

I’ve highlighted only a few selections here, but each one of these pieces surprised me in different ways.

Each piece here is a dance, skyclad and wild, a dance that thrums and gyrates and reminds us of what it means to be human.


Letter from the Art Editor
I think of the Autumn Equinox as a gate-day to a time of year that evokes the spiritual, an invitation to reduce our pace and metabolize our experiences from the months prior. The works chosen for this edition of Pink Disco, The Moon, by the talented illustrator Irina Tall Novikova and masterful photographer Jaina Cipriano, do just that - they gently force the viewer to take pause and, involuntarily, to really see, to really feel.

The mesmerizing eyes staring back from Novikova’s “Girl and dragon” bore into my very being, the red marks strew across the surface evoking passion and excitement and pain in an otherwise beautifully subdued palette. Her other works so breathlessly compliment the former as to make a misservice of viewing them alone.

Seeing Cipriano’s self-portraiture made me sit straighter, to take attention of the exploration of pain and healing I was invited to witness. Immediately I was struck by “Power Prayer,” the figure reminiscent of Justice, so powerful and yet vulnerable, bathed in crimson. Each image is self-reflective, a glimpse of the artist’s challenging journey, one that holds a mirror to our own.

I find all of these pieces wonderfully haunting and I invite you to explore them in detail more than once, coming back to them as you read, to let them set a tone for the narratives below.

___

This issue’s playlist can be found here.
Visual Art
Irina Tall Novikova
Girl and masks
Girl and dragon
Girl and fishes
Jaina Cipriano
Who is the Dreamer?
Power Prayer
Blurred Lines
You Tried to Bury Me
Poetry
Ashley Laurel
Stitch
Act 1
Act 2
Act 3
Act 4
Kate Polak
Placing the Moon
What I’ve Done for Love
Rumination on Fustigation
Richard Vargas
sorting and pricing donated clothes for the local thrift store #4
Rina Shamilov
Diameters
Water’s Grace
Now I Am Become Woman
Swole
Myriam Klatt
what i am thinking about while i get dressed
if we could stay here
The State of my Bisexuality ca. 2002
what i wish for since i met you
heartburn
Golda Grais
After starting to watch porn at the age of 21
asphyxia
In Spite of Me by Morphine
Kate Stinson
The Proper Way to Make Me Squirt
I Can Not Bear to Look at What I Consumed
Amber Dawn
Woe to the max.
Chilly Down
Age Play
Intraoperative Photographs
Aisha Ali
A Truce
Song of the Reformed People Pleaser
Claudia Wysocky
Unfinished Exit
Nonfiction
B.B. Pats
Gravity
Butterflies
Fiction
Samantha Barrow
Dizzy Spells
B.B. Pats
Great Lake



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