Flank(ed), by Paul Koniecki

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Set in the Midwest heart of the 1970’s rust belt, Flank(ed) is, at its core, the story of two boys growing up in the shadow of Milwaukee’s factories and breweries who find that when they have nothing else to count on at least they have each other. Like snowdrifts and ice and yeast in the air, danger seemed to always be around. Friendship, found family, alcoholism, schizophrenia, and fishing are all subjects that play significant roles in Timmy and Paulie’s formative years. We follow the pair from ages 4 to 18. Lacking the language then, we can look back and see children in the very real, very harrowing, situations of being raised by parents who were self-medicating for untreated mental illnesses. Questions of masculinity, femininity, and boys being the victims of abuse, mix like reflections in a room full of broken fun-house mirrors and remain as complicated today as then. What is lonelier than an unanswered question?

For movie buffs, Flank(ed), is a little like a mixture of Stand By Me meets Mystic River and Huckleberry Finn recast by David Lynch. The author walks a trail, where writing about abuse is concerned, that was blazed by Roxane Gay and, while staring into the face of horrible acts, is reminiscent of Frank Bidart and Ai/Florence Ogawa. Hidden things take on a strange and sickening power. Bringing difficult subjects into the light is hard work and necessary reading. The happy times may have been the hardest of all to write and read about. The 1970’s are here looming as a shadow character as well as the poor end of the suburbs where the story is set on the outskirts of the legendary, to Timmy and Paulie, Greenfield Park.

Paul Koniecki lives and writes in Dallas, Texas. His poems have appeared in Thimble, Chiron Review, Henniker Review, Poetry Bay, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Richard Bailey’s movie One of the Rough distributed by AVIFF Cannes, and many other places. He was once chosen for the John Ashbery Home School Residency and received his MFA in Poetry from VCFA in 2024. Additionally his poem, “On Prayer Mountain” closed Verdigris Ensemble’s opera “Faces of Dallas”.