Moonburn by C. E. Hoffman
God can’t do it all alone. Like he said that Tuesday on a podcast,
“I can’t be everything for everyone.
That’s why I made all of you.”
I was prepared to believe him. I’ve sucked cocks for a living; I’ve cut skin and rescued kittens. Tiny worlds escape from my cuticles. I lick galaxies off my lips. I sob, “I’m worthy” to my therapist. I plunder the Amazon in search of neck-support pillows and ear wax removal kits only to abandon them thanks to poetic poverty and guilt over pregnant women in warehouses barred from bathroom breaks. I like emo and country because they’re pathetic and adorable and say the same thing. They are crabs without shells. Like me.
Who decided to call a zodiac a “cancer?” Why is my skin so delicate the moon could make it burn. Why do I sit here, wax plugging my ears, leftover food stuck up my guts because he and I finally managed anal.
Why do we need to give everything a name?
Am I a punk without my safety pins? A feminist without listing my pronouns? Why do you need to know? I’m sometimes a woman, occasionally a man, a will-o-fucking-wisp or glimpse of infinity.
I am. Human. Trying hard, clapping quietly.
Isn’t that enough?
Am I a bitch, slut, sub, dyke, cunt, stupid, silly, whore? Is that the worst I’ve ever been? Or the best? Am I just beginning to discover what I can do.
Maybe we shouldn’t give babies names. Identity only complicates. We’d be better off back in the godslop, the intractable infinitude, the all the one the never was before the word the bang before snakes woke us up.
No one can retrace their steps to the moon. No one can return to the womb. If we did, it’d be cold. Home becomes a cage if you go back too soon, or never had the chance to leave. The show must go on because it must.
Life ain’t all blowjobs and daisies, babe. But it ain’t all holocausts and hurricanes. Truth exists beyond entrances or exits, past the road stops of right and wrong, over and under and through, out and further and higher and ever onward, across the rainbow bridge over the moon river astride the river styx, where the rejects are accepted and oppressed run free, where pixies gallop across meadows of the great ideas we forgot, the tip-of-the-tongues, the what-I-meant-was, the fiddledeedees of the soul, out amongst the animals Adam has yet to name.
C. E. Hoffman was born, gave birth, and tried to die in Edmonton, AB (not necessarily in that order.) A grant winner and cat lover, they wrote their first novel at eleven years old, and have continued writing ever since. Their #OwnVoices debut Sluts and Whores is available via Thurston Howl Publications. Find more weirdness at cehoffman.net