After the Tassel Falls

This poem, “Where Should I Go?”, explores the uncertainty and disorientation that often follows graduation, when the symbolic weight of achievement collides with the material realities of debt, labor precarity, and limited opportunity. Written in a reflective yet ethnographically informed voice, the piece engages with themes of aspiration, belonging, and survival in the context of contemporary social landscapes. The poem’s imagery moves between the celebratory moment of commencement and the closed doors of the job market, capturing the tension between institutional promises and lived experience. By framing unemployment and underemployment not merely as economic conditions but as cultural and emotional geographies, the poem situates personal struggle within wider structures of inequality and expectation. The speaker resists treating mobility as solely spatial moving home, moving to cities, or moving into nonprofit work, and instead imagines a practice of moving deeper into the everyday. In doing so, the poem suggests that “where to go” may not be a matter of place but of orientation: toward listening, meaning-making, and the margins as potential centers of life.