Notes From the Margins

Pizza & Trauma Spring 2025 Poem 10

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.

Love is so complicated. We love and we grieve that love when it’s gone. But is it ever gone completely? It can be remembered in a heartbeat, a remembrance of a gesture, of a touch. Love is so powerful. Love can make you feel like the most confident person in the world, or it can crush you like a bug.

Love is something we shouldn’t give up on. Love is so important to us. Love keeps us strong in the remembrance of things past and hopeful for those things in the future. Love is a photograph in your soul.

Poem 10

When I think of you I will always remember your smile.

And the sound of your laugh, the feeling in my chest when you show your love,

Which burns brighter than you know

Love is so potent, isn’t it?

Whether it’s used to comfort or destroy.

It makes you appreciate all the little things and miss other things so badly that you can hardly bear it.

Love is a collection of ghosts.

People might forget your face, but now how you made them feel.

So be kind.

Love. Enjoy. Smell the flowers.

Take a picture.

Remember to breathe.

It’s a mad world.

People come, people go.

But love stays.