Junior Partner, by Nilla Larsen

Nilla Larsen holds a MFA in poetry from UNC-Wilmington. Her poems are featured in or forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Slippery Elm, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing First Place Poetry Fellowship. Follow her on Twitter @nillalarsen.

Poet on the Poem:
“Junior Partner” is the most slash-full poem I’ve written so far, but the slashes were not part of the early drafts. What jumpstarted the poem were the similes in stanza one, which challenged me to find the resonant qualities in mundane, inanimate objects. The narrative is inspired by two lines from Jenny Hval’s song ‘That Battle is Over’: “So are we loving ourselves now? Are we mothering ourselves?”