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Nick Flynn Reads “Embrace Noir”
Nick Flynn Reads “Embrace Noir”
Nick Flynn — memoirist of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City — gave us this reading of one of his own poems: “Embrace Noir.” It’s a bonus on his appearance on our show about Boston Noir last week. Kunal Jasty mixed his reading with the John Coltrane classic, “A Love Supreme.” Have a listen, and have a noir week….
EMBRACE NOIR
I go back to the scene where the two men embrace
& grapple a handgun at stomach level between them.
They jerk around the apartment like that
holding on to each other, their cheeks
almost touching. One is shirtless, the other
wears a suit, the one in the suit came in through a window
to steal documents or diamonds, it doesn’t matter anymore
which, what’s important is he was found
& someone pulled a gun & now they are holding on,
awkwardly dancing through the room, upending
a table of small framed photographs. A chair
topples, Coltrane’s band punches the air with horns, I
lean forward, into the screen, they are eye-to-eye,
as stiff as my brother & me when we attempt
to hug. Soon, the gun fires & the music
quiets & the camera stops tracking & they
relax—shoulders drop, jaws go slack
& we are all suspended in that perfect moment
when no one knows who took the bullet—
the earth spins below our feet, a murmuration of
starlings changes direction suddenly above us, folding
into the rafters of a barn,
& the two men no longer struggle, they simply
stand in their wreckage, propped
in each other’s arms.