N. Minnick

The Talk

Father walked in on me
my brain in one hand
my heart in the other

It’ll do you no good
he said no good at all
once you realize that

you must learn
the difference between
need and desire, pleasure

and sacrifice and he
wept and I wept though
not for the same reasons

N. Minnick’s previous poetry collections are To Taste the Water (winner of the First Series Award from Mid-List Press), Folly (Wind Publications), and Advice for a Young Poet (David Robert Books). Minnick is the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press) and The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight, forthcoming from Kinchafoonee Creek Press (with a foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa). Recent poems and essays have been published in The Georgia Review, The Sun, World Literature Today, and New World Writing.