What It's Like To Leave You, by KaiLuna Holmes

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

What It’s Like To Leave You explores the devastating experience of loving someone who despite everything, cannot remain. Across cars, airplanes, windows, suitcases, and temporary homes, the poems explore the spaces created by distance and the desperate desire to close them. Nature and the physical world become witnesses to separation: curtains are closed, coyotes surrender to hunger, rain blurs windshields, and a harsh northern environment becomes inseparable from a heart trying to find its way home.

The collection moves between sweetness and anger, devotion and desperation, fantasy and reality. Its speaker craves permanence but repeatedly encounters the temporary nature of love and the painful knowledge that wanting someone does not mean being able to keep them. Desire becomes prayer, obsession, addiction, and poetry itself, while leaving becomes a series of departures that the heart continues to resist. What It’s Like To Leave You offers a raw depiction of the mess within a goodbye and the reality that love does not necessarily disappear simply because someone makes that choice.

KaiLuna Holmes is a poet whose work explores love, longing, faith, and desire. Her poetry is rooted in sensory detail and emotional honesty, often weaving the physical world with questions of devotion and identity. Her work is driven by an attention to language, rhythm, image, and the strange beauty found in ordinary moments. For KaiLuna, writing is a way of understanding herself within the absurdity that is life and love.