ephemeral heart, by rain m.j. eden

Poetry, prose poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

"every beat of this beast of ephemeral heart pushes me forward, forward, forward, and out into your world i come. it is beautiful or horrifying, this precipice." ephemeral heart is my personal exploration of escaping the real lived horrors of prolific childhood sex abuse and coming into adult relationships trying to learn genuine safety for the first time. i am so often still firmly rooted in wrongness, unable to remove myself from ingrained ideas i learned to make Me easier to hurt. but the glimpses of the present: the now i have created for myself, the distance I cultivate from Then, and the me that spans between hopelessness and healing: these are what i know to be real. these are the gods that i believe in now.

i am so excited to finally tell my own story, in my own words, and hopefully to reach other adult survivors stumbling through their first infant steps of life at legal adult ages. i keep saying, “i feel like now that i finally know the truth i cannot get it out of me fast enough.” i need the other kids like me, who confide in books of poetry in the nighttime, to know that someone like them can make it through all of these feelings and days and come out on the other side, better for it. i spent so much life writing poetry believing myself to be another Plath, destined for death before i could ever be understood. i think so many little poets and artists have hearts like this, and i want them to know that they can make their own ways through, in their own words. i love you. i see you. i believe you. thank you for creating this belief in me.

rain m.j. eden is a poet and a lover of living things. they grew up in buffalo, ny and now live in cambridge, ma where they are relearning the world and seeking beautiful experiences within it. they live with their partner, their metamour, and their dogs, atlas and rigby. they are passionate about sharing their lived experience of autism, trauma, queer identity, and disability through their writing and across their social media platforms as a form of suicide prevention and social change advocacy. rain prefers to be described as a jack of all trades and master of none, as they navigate the world through an endlessly changing perspective.