Letter from the Editors
Our world is filled with erotic energy.
The word erotic is loaded and, at best, ambiguous; yet, for most of us, it’s also excitatory. It elicits
sensations, memories, fantasies, an entire world that is most often submerged below the surface of our
everyday selves. But what, exactly, is erotic and what does it mean to publish a magazine dedicated to
the erotic in arts and literature?
Perhaps in contemplating the erotic, we should gaze backwards toward ancient Greece where the
concept was borne from the flutter of Eros’s wings. The word erotic comes from the Greek myth of Eros.
Eros, once a primordial force within the universe and then, in later myths, the offspring of Aphrodite and
Ares, Eros came to represent those forces of love and fertility. In part, the early myths have endured and
even transmutated from culture to culture because they capture the complexity of the human experience and distill it into simple archetypes and stories. Eros is no different. Though Eros’s origins evolved over time, he has remained a force active in the lives of all of us, igniting within us our own carnality and desire.
With this in mind, I like to think of Eros as the seat of our soul from which the most primal and sexual
parts of our natures emerge. The erotic, then, is the form in which our carnality takes shape.
When contemplating the themes of Pink Disco, I thought hard about what it means to feel that energy.
On the one hand, we could easily look at what has become commodified as sex in our society and point
to that as erotic. To some extent, this works. But I also firmly believe some of the most potent sex we
encounter is founcd in the sublime and secret whispers of our everyday lives.
Don’t get me wrong. Pink Disco welcomes latex, leather, nipple clamps, and feathers. We want to see your O face. But we also believe the most explicit sex is not an isolated act but the apex of the totality of our experience; it is a celebration of what it means to be human, to have a body, and to experience sensation.
Pink Disco, then, is a celebration of the erotic, our carnality, our bodies, and ultimately our humanness.
Come play with us.
Pink
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.
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.
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
Girl and masks
Girl and dragon
Girl and fishes
Who is the Dreamer?
Power Prayer
Blurred Lines
You Tried to Bury Me
Poetry
Stitch
Act 1
Act 2
Act 3
Act 4
Placing the Moon
What I’ve Done for Love
Rumination on Fustigation
sorting and pricing donated clothes for the local thrift store #4
Diameters
Water’s Grace
Now I Am Become Woman
Swole
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
After starting to watch porn at the age of 21
asphyxia
In Spite of Me by Morphine
The Proper Way to Make Me Squirt
I Can Not Bear to Look at What I Consumed
Woe to the max.
Chilly Down
Age Play
Intraoperative Photographs
A Truce
Song of the Reformed People Pleaser
Unfinished Exit
Nonfiction
Gravity
Butterflies
Fiction
Dizzy Spells
Great Lake