September 22, 2024

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.


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.

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This issue’s playlist can be found here.