Notes From the Margins

Pizza & Trauma Spring 2025 Poem 8

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.

We all have had disappointments. Somehow we get through. We have inner strengths that we don’t even know we have. But we get strength from each other. We hear each other’s pain. Our pain, shared, is a healing process. We write about our disappointments and the wounds they incur.

These wounds are our battle scars. They are our medals of honor on the emotional front. They remind us of how much we have overcome. Wounds that are shared are wounds diminished: we take comfort from those who we trust enough to share these intimate details with.

Poem 8

While people may not see it everyone around us has wounds.

These wounds deepen or heal depending on us.

Though some wounds leave scars as reminders,

All wounds close up eventually.

I know they “say that” but do they really close?

I reckon they close but the mark remains, all pink and puffy and raised.

I should be open to it, I guess,

But I struggle with it.

Even though I struggle, I will grin and bear it.