I want to pick up a mic and say what I think
I tell the counselor at Unemployment 
when she asks, What’s your dream job?
(me, nineteen, needing work between babies)
Honey, nobody cares what you think
(she, middle-aged, straddling kindness and candor)
In high school, I excelled in Speech and Debate,
didn’t know my dream job answer was stupid
until the words spill from my mouth
and change the look on her face.
I’d been an actress too, could cry on demand,
Go to college, learn something, have something to say
but holding tears back was a script I’d not mastered.
She slides a box of tissue across the desk,
then a slip of paper with the address
of a spot needing a girl to mind the phone.
I give my nose a resounding blow.
Honey, the bell rings, pick up, say hello.

In college, I learned new words—
reification, nascent, inchoate—
hard to pronounce, even harder 
to slide into conversation.
Ambiguity I loved, word describing
the world to me on my sail out
from the certain harbor of youth.
But ambivalence I made my own—
moving simultaneously toward 
and away from what I loved, 
fortress of the known unknown.