Kara Candito — WHISTLEBLOWER

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.