Kara Candito
WHISTLEBLOWER
Kara Candito is American. Kara Candito is
a field where you threw something at your
father and missed. She sits supine in the tall
grasses of herself and scratches for mosquitoes.
She is the phobia of flying things and the summer
you convalesced with Lyme disease, waking
to smug robin song and clumps of the hair
that strangers admired matting the sheets.
Kara Candito, a killer of compliments,
a regime of sickness, so like the death-dances
of flies in the windows of a house that smelled
like swimming too long in a lake and diving
to the bottom to drag fistfuls of muck
into the light. Kara Candito, the muck
you open into the light, like a mouth. She is
speech itself and verbs with conjugations
like the color-coded recycling bins someone
schleps each Monday to a facility you’ve
never seen and the anxiety of wondering
if the paper towels are paper and how soiled
is soiled? And are paper towels evil? And what
do they do with cloth diapers stained
with an infant stranger’s shit? She is the fear
of excrement and invasion. She is your
neighbor who knocks and tells you
to turn the music down because she has
a conference call in ten minutes. Kara Candito
is the American entitlement to silence
at noon on a Tuesday, or the 77th page
of a book about a stillborn philosophy
that goes 55 mph in a 30; independence
and spiteful tolerance, independence
and the softball you wrote your name on
then ditched for months in your mother’s trunk
until she blue-balled the aluminum trashcan
that never kept raccoons out. Kara Candito
is a nocturnal spider; everything you’ve ever
ingested involuntarily and the hours you
spent worrying about it in a car on the way
to a city where you let everything in until
even your memories of its natural disasters
became open mouths. Kara Candito is you
pulling off the interstate and passing
six gas stations before you settle
for the least evil one and the faith
that the least evil exists.