Lauren Holahan is a twenty-year-old photographer and musician. She is currently studying photography at Endicott College.  In this prose poem she captures the unrehearsed joy of a young woman – with a flourish of colors and vivid images.

Lauren Holahan

Her skirt flares out as she dances around the desolate concrete parking lot, its floral pattern bringing a new life to the grey and white ground below her tiny, high-heeled feet. She almost slips; stilettos aren’t exactly the proper footwear for spinning around in circles while clutching a bottle of champagne in one of her bony hands. This doesn’t dim her spirits, as she laughs off her near-fall and raises the emerald-tinted bottle to her lips, leaving little rings of blood red lipstick on the bottle when she pulls away. I can tell from the amount of makeup beginning to melt from her face that she will wake up in the morning with unpleasant black marks that could compete with even the worst of under eye bags. Her feet will be incredibly sore from her moonlit adventures strutting imaginary catwalks across campus and hours of dancing to the beat of an amateur DJ. But from what I can see, she doesn’t care. Right now as she spins, she is in a ballroom in Paris, or perhaps the fields of an Italian vineyard, dancing around happily. And that is all that matters.

— Lauren Holahan

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