Notes From the Margins

Pizza & Trauma Spring 2025 Poem 9

This is work done by the Pizza and Trauma Writing Group, Spring 2025  - A writing group within the Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center of Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)

We met every Friday during the Spring semester 2025 to eat Pizza together and write, both separately and together, culminating in an extemporaneous group poem. Although the membership varied every week, the group began to write as a group whose voice became one as the semester progressed.

The following ten poems are the poems of this group. Thank you, Pizza and Trauma Writing Group for showing up for the group and for yourself.

Our stories are multi-faceted. Memories come randomly: they don’t come all at once and they are not linear. Sometimes we remember just parts of memories and then later the rest of the memories come to fill in the blanks.

Feelings can be so profound. The intensity can be stifling at times. But the fact is that feelings change. They change all the time. When we are open to it, we get new information that changes our feelings completely. These are the feelings of the chapters of the book of our lives.

Poem 9

Can’t change your feelings.

Express your emotions.

Or else you might turn into a robot. Beep-boop!

But you never know where metamorphosis will lead you.

On the outside or on the inside—can you do both at the same time?

Yes, because I am the author, and I write the chapter,

At end of the day, this is MY story.