June 2025: I’ve just finished mastering an entire school of Philosophy before breakfast. Hypatia led the Neoplatonist movement, favored scientific inquiry over religious dogma and made lasting contributions to mathematics and astronomy before being killed by an irate Christian mob. Lucky her. She got to die. I instead, am made to live, to bear witness to clodpolls attempting lyrical essays. John D’Agata gets a pass, maybe Deborah Tall. But the rest of you suck! I mean, seriously suck! You’re ruining the form for fuck’s sake! Write something else already, like memes or knock knock jokes.

The sea dances with my rage. How brief my seaside vanity-of-ritual is: Gulls and cormorants mock my resignation. Unpretentious and rugged, my isolated a priori existence feels on this cold coast. My bones cramp with foreboding, while the sun mirrors every molecule of water with a brightness that destroys inner shadows and burns corneas. Speaking of burnt corneas: At your best, you bitches are mere glitter to my candela. I outshine all of you, on all given days. Yet, it is I who suffer your befouled attempts at ripping me off.

MFA students, doppelganging the Spin Doctors, espouse their longstanding, profoundly intimate knowledge of the lyrical essay. Bullshit! Nobody knew what the fuck it was before I did it. Did you get a Guggenheim or an NEA Fellowship? How about a MacArthur Grant? You know, the ones they call GENIUS GRANTS?  I did. I’m the motherfucking Higgs Boson particle of lyrical essays, you copycatting, creatively barren, fuckwads. Can’t you at least wait until I’m dead?

Maggie Nelson is to Higgs & Englert as Geniuses are to Geniuses. A : B :: C : C

St. Thomas Aquinas was a brilliant fool. Brilliant for knowing that a person has no privileged self-understanding; that we understand ourselves and our world through sensory perception, experience and abstraction. Smart for knowing that self-knowledge is an achievement, not a given. Perhaps you could try achieving your own

Original.

Fucking.

Work. You know, something that is both counterpoetry and counterprose. Oh, what’s that? You can’t? The best you can hope for is to crowd my singular space? To ride my coattails, you goddamned jackoffs!

Daily, the sea lies before me, framed by an unforgiving and flood-bruised coastline. I sit on a rock and lean against another, just as the sea gently leans against sand. The waters are calm and dark and genderly fluid. Shades of navy blue and gray swirl together. The sun cannot penetrate the cloud cover to paint the sea brilliant blues. Speaking of brilliant blues, did you fuck a color? I did. Good luck topping that! I hear red is awfully lonely. How about yellow? No one’s going to fuck yellow.

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Candi Joneth is a writer; living, researching and writing from the cold coast of Maine. She is a master’s candidate in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard. She has published over 200 news articles, over 50 features, for three newspapers. She uses humor to release tension and engage humanity.