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Happy Full Moon in Aries. Today, we’re publishing my editor’s note from The Rebis, Volume 5: The Moon, as I am honored to be the guest editor. Subscribe to the newsletter for more writing on divination, poetics, & decolonization. Enroll in the Griot: starwitnesses & Blessed Water Bearers, by upgrading to the Vault here Also, preorders are currently open for The Moon and the publication will ship out by the end of October. Our new print issue features more than 40 writers and artists exploring themes of The Moon. You’ll get a beautiful full-color 8x10 book with 142 pages of personal essays, creative nonfiction, short stories, poetry, interviews, and original artwork. We redistribute all profits to social justice orgs focused on reparations & reproductive justice.

In the interstice between the haptic and the sonic, well beyond tangible visibility, diversely repressed realities emerge with insistent possibility.

Stroll a dark road. Listen closely. The margins’ many others are rising with the Moon—crooning, moaning, communing in all their plurivocality. There is no unified subject under moonlight. The West’s monolithic, unceasingly sterile constructs here come undone. 

Crescent, quarter, gibbous, full; growth from and toward voidness for a new Moon cannot be seen at all. An eclipsed moon, a void moon, communicates itself as no-self. It is an event; a process of metaphysical recomposition. Walk under its inverted light and realize it is red earth you are walking on; you will see the terrain of struggle renew with each step and so many subjectivities will return, de-territorialized. Nothing under this flickering Moon asks permission. Laws are left behind, translucent in their unenforceability.

Our struggles shapeshift, assuming new forms from the old, recursively mutating between loss and gain. Each phase ventures into another area of social dissent.

When the Moon eclipses the Sun, it exposes the limits of centralized conscious knowledge. It demystifies all ideology presenting itself as infallible truth. At the other end, the Moon waxes red to forewarn of approaching calamity. The regularity of the system is to be breached, opening rather than enclosing, an empty space, a void to escape rational thought, to incite revolution. Lunar light disrupts, brings disarray to dominant systems, values, social and cultural order. Rationalizations are a revolving door the Moon has made transparent. Moreso, the Moon tears down regimes of representation. This is a struggle between fictions. No man has ever actually moonwalked and now, a fictional nation’s fake flag finally flies away.

Here is a face displaced, a pause beneath and between multiple forms till existence is made into a mirage, the signifier no longer containing the signified. The sign is now insignificant, turned inside out, pushed aside, undone, rendered abject. The mysterious luminosity is now lusterless, matte.

The Red Moon is a reversal. It doesn’t conceal, it’s an unsightly exposure perturbing the author, artist, diviner. Caught in capitalist illusions, man’s corruption can no longer be denied, he’s been made by the Moon, unmade.

To produce a void, the lunar event suspends all meaning, into which we throw a card, dice, speech. We seek indirect illumination in a sidewise glance, but by the time you finally grasp the Moon, its thrown its old skin away. The Moon is ever so elusive when treated directly. That hand pointing to the Moon, in its desire to grasp, inevitably confuses illusion and reality. The only tongue that speaks truth, then, is one which explores as profoundly as possible the unreal reality of language. This is a speech that advances by questioning its own authority. Defer closure. This event is the unnaming of mastery. This is The Rebis: Volume 5, an assemblage of lunatics simultaneously pious and pitiful, unbelievably poetic and prophetic.

This volume has become a howling collective prayer, a plea for an internal clarity inspired by the dark awe of fulfillment only to be found when we forsake the exaltation of evidence, efficiency and strategic prediction. We want to be revitalized, a renewal only achievable when we risk our social legibility.

Writing unravels and weaves at once with that tireless gesture of finger-Moon-mirage. Is the Moon up above me or in my hand? Is it white, black, or red? Is this Moon scorned or exalted? Somehow it’s folded its mirror into a pack of cards I can carry around to exist simultaneously with the text. But is it a mirror or a magnet? It turns over, shifts phase, and I stray from the beaten path. I crisscross occupied territories to perforate meaning on the wild paths of interpretation. The Moon’s lunar language exceeds, opens up semantic relationship. A sign is an unreal container. Strip it away and feel how harrowing it will be to let only intuition lead you.

The Moon gathers wolves and dogs and swelling tides with bottomfeeders rising to get rid of our many fears. Its magic is impressed into the tarot because the tarot is a text that resists the problems of classification with boundaries that are forever mutating. Its’ arcanum is a site of intercreation. This interrelation takes the diviner from reader to writer, from viewer to maker, from the theoretical to the experiential, toward a radical unknowing wherein you finally face the sublime extremity of revelation.

You read and re-read the tarot and the Moon turns to black and white and back again and you render visible the invisible, the voiding of light, the revenant made reverent from uncanny invocations.

Moon-made writers trace erased presences kept invisible by ideology of visibility. Lunar looking begins when we can read all the labor that canonical literature does to unspeak all those voices, bodies and beings it deems to be intolerable.

Reality is defined in terms of the visible, because in the frenzy of visibility, the real becomes indistinguishable with what can be seen. The consumer society is always trying to cover up its open wound so as to evade any radical reflection. It is so intolerant of ambiguity, indecision, and uncertainty. It cannot face its own void. It wants only effortless, unthinking consumption.

If you were exiled from Earth by men addicted to power and possession, could you take up sanctuary on the Moon and free yourself forever? We must hear, look and listen intensely in unexpected places. We must make the common language foreign with the many repeated mistakes you will make when writing under moonlight. Correct syntax is for the Sun. At night, the stable signifier, the known name, is displaced. To unfold the comings and goings of desire, the plurality of meaning cannot be collapsed. The Moon’s surface is always intertextual.

Or so you will find as you flip through this year’s volume of The Rebis. Hannah Levy, the publication’s founder and editor, reached out with the invitation to guest edit this tarot anthology coalescing so many mediums, creators, authors, diviners, artists, and theorists, while in a period of intuitive absence. She framed this as a distant listening.

Before becoming a conduit for the inspired word, an emptying occurs. As the thematic announcement was made, the submission cycle corresponded with the Aquarius solar eclipse in February 2026. We received record submissions. This was an invitation toward the natural chaos of a Black Sun, a Red Moon. We were naturally bewildered by the hundreds and hundreds of submissions willing to venture into the queerest of phenomenologies. Every selected contributor punctured us in the way an eclipse punctures the flat, predictable sky.

There is an imaginative arc to the structure of this year’s volume, wherein the night grows longer, darker, and more feral with each turning page. Deeper into midnight, the more deviant we become, the more suspect, the more moral subterfuge we risk when we awaken dormant instincts and desires.

Read this issue any which way you want—deviate from the chronological structure and you will be an eclipsed reader, breaking time, suspensefully anticipating revelation, vitally disoriented.

As this issue of The Rebis has been framed by the void, we asked our artists: how does the Moon partake of language and representation? We said, widen the space of freedom, tell us that we will only survive if we understand that we need each other. Harness the Moon’s restorative power and cohere the fragmented again and again, and of our relations bring us into lunar alliance. Here is the space for creative reinvention. Invite us in.

Show me how to listen like a stranger in my own land and keep my touch tender as I caress the fragile essence of appearance.

X,

Our out-of-print editions, The Wheel of Fortune and The Chariot, are finally back in stock, joining The Star, The Devil, and The Moon. 

The more you collect, the more you save: 

Discount applied automatically at checkout. All issues will ship together by the end of October.