Notes From the Margins

Pizza & Trauma Spring 2025

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. 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.

Poem One

All things that start out—unknown, tentative, seemingly unsure, much of the time with the true meaning obscured. We're not sure what we are doing, exactly, but when we open up we may find something that perhaps wasn’t there before, or, more importantly, we'd never seen about ourselves before.

Because maybe it was there, but we just weren’t aware of it.

This poem reflects that tentativeness, that unknowingness of the process, but eventually trusting in it and forging on. The idea of wishing to keep straight lines and then realizing how funny that is… ha ha… is the question that we ask ourselves: what lines do you follow… and if they can’t be straight lines, are the okay anyway? That is the question this poem poses.

Our souls, part of nature which has no straight lines, are bared in this poem and we ask the questions as we prepare ourselves to receive the answers.

I’m coming up on something different,

I can just tell.

The cold metal against my skin sends shivers down my spine.

It’s comforting yet creepy but at least my pain is mine.

I wish that I could share.

I wish I could keep a straight line.

Honestly, I can’t keep anything straight. Haha, get it?

Me neither! That’s the beauty of life, isn’t it?

Nature produces no straight lines.