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 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.

Poem Five

If resilience is the opposite of despair, then it makes sense that we seek resilience. But it’s difficult, to be vigilant that we’re falling back into old patterns that don’t serve us anymore. The modern life we live is filled up with a million rabbit holes to go down. In a way, this freedom is also a liability. There are too many choices. We are too too busy all the time. It’s tiring, to be sure. And when our present life becomes a conglomeration of both memories and present reality, it can be too much. Here’s a poem about being resilient and what it means to carry on.

I’m sick of resilience. Aren’t you tired, too?

I am but I’m doing it anyway, and so are you.

This thing called life.

So short, yet so busy

To see, to hear, to be a memory.

I’ll relive it all to be born much stronger.

And in this new life I’ll be much kinder.

I’m a reflection – I am the love that we all need to give.

So many facets to me in all my mirror copies. I’m not sure if I know all of mine.