Roger Patulny writes and publishes creative fiction. Creatively, he runs the Authora Australis and Silence of the Pens writing groups, and writes contemporary social, historical, and futurist inspired fiction prose and poetry, with publications in The Urban Review, Cordite, the Urchin Press collection Imaginary Worlds, and the sociological fiction zine SOFI. Links to his Roger’s recent published works can be found below – please click on the title for each piece:

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Short Fiction:

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Listen to a podcast of the ‘The Spitting Bridge’, read by Melbourne-based actor Jonathan Lukins on behalf of ‘The Someone New Podcast’ HERE.

The Spitting Bridge – 2019,
The Suburban Review

A single dad commuting from Wollongong and Sydney for the hundredth, hated time, takes his daughter to school, and reflects on family, city life and commitment.

An excerpt –

“We can’t reach the summit soon enough, and then everybody accelerates out onto the F6 with a huge, collective sigh of relief. The cars merge smoothly in space, thickening, absorbed into a fast moving, northbound metal river. We relax, and I hand Lucy the bowl of cereal from where I have had it perched on my lap. We pass a menagerie of crow-infested roadkill—kangaroo, wombat, an occasional deer—but Lucy is too hungry today to notice. She pours the cereal, unscrews the jar, and tips out a little milk—she’s learnt not to overfill and spill—and carefully spoons cornflakes into her mouth. She is calmer with food”

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Green Grapes Red – 2020, Stories of Hope,
Australian Speculative Fiction

Working at a petrol station, Joel tries not worry as the bushfires get closer and closer, but a mysterious cyclist insists that the time for not worrying has long past …

An excerpt –

“A row of firemen stood as dark silhouettes along the highway. Beyond them rose the inferno, a wall of flame, leaping into the fields. Grapes began to burst, and vines began to whither like skeletons in the night.”

The Red Ball – 2016, Imaginary Worlds

Alex runs from a failed relationship all the way to Mars, to take on the best cricket team in the Solar System: Jammu Utopia. Struggling to play with a low mood in low gravity, he drifts, explores and starts to find a freedom his web-enveloped life on Earth never revealed to him – along with other new truths.

An excerpt –

“Alex thought about all the junk floating in space. On Earth, you were accountable. They photographed and micro-fined you for every piece of litter, chewing gum, dog shit, lost tissue, or cigarette butt you left on the perfect white sidewalks. You owned your past. Not up here. In space, you built cities, half built them, abandoned them; half finished mountains of scrap and scaffolding, floating in the ether, in random trajectories, in orbit, grainy new stars for the planet-dwellers below. It didn’t seem to matter. Space was endless. There were always more skies”

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Poetry Excerpts

Compost Lies – 16 July 2020,

Poets Corner, InDaily

Don’t believe
the countless trips, dripping ichor
barefoot across wet grass
to drop carrot heads and half a rotten watermelon
into the black basin
will be rewarded by sweet compost lying there …

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Sweethbreathe – 1 July 2020,

The Mark Literary Review

I’ll buy a beer
to talk things through,
but when you send it back,
amber moistened beads
reminding me of throats and necks,
I’ll reach for top-shelf words instead.

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Attrition – 24 June 2020, Poets Corner, InDaily

My father and I
have a war of attrition.

I drive two hours to his house in winter
and throw out jars and packets …

He drives three hours to retaliate in summer,
with an esky filled with anonymous chicken

FlatPack Hipster – June 2020, Indolent Books (What Rough Beast)

One long night, confined,
I ordered a hipster online.

When he arrived,
I had a quite a time assembling him.
There was no Allen key,
and the instructions were all ticks and crosses
and pictures of sexless men scratching their heads …

Thirteen Ingredients – 2020, Poets Corner, InDaily

Take:
1. Morning rays, fractals in dewy windowsill mint.
2. Hints of – yogurt, honey, chia, and passionfruit-flecked granola.
3. Cool chamomile, huge ice cube; suspension of orange and strawberry.
4. Summer-cycling the back-ridge track; vector the backyard cricket.
5. Bat kids off ghost gums, inverted arms, sugar-rainbow grins.
6. Midday heat, icy dill, fresh seafood, thick lemon wedges …

Pissed on the F3 – 2020,
The Rye Whiskey Review

I see him,
  eyes slanted,
ear buds in,
                                       rollerblading
   down the median strip
                        of the F3,
    with a VB …

Listen to a podcast of the four Dwell Time Poems below, read by Melbourne-based actor Emma Wood on behalf of ‘The Someone New Podcast’ HERE.

Why not a kiss – 2020, Dwell Time

You wear a mask as you always have, in the space
between our parted lips, which should be immaterial, and watch with
languid eyes over hospital grade cloth.

Will you make up for the time we miss?
Or will you hold these abstentions
closer to your heart instead,
a grand vacuum, the noble sacrifice of ether,
our fingers ever-reaching through the screens,
a digital communication never rotting
in the fecund air of true romance …

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Pilgrim 19 – 2020, Dwell Time

With flood and fire barely past,
and hot smoke lingering by the sea
and bats swarming from their autumn holes,
flapping like shopping bags,
entrapped in market stalls …

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Aerosol – 2020, Dwell Time

I imagine them immune from long exposure.

Cat-faced publishers,
sit po-faced, unaffected
as I cannonade my poems at their ether,
scatter-gunning outlets
with the droplets of my words …

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Mass and Sand – 2020, Dwell Time

… Life under the virus,
which we all now know,
makes me fear that we will all go
not in one destructive blast,
but by attrition, numbers, no contrition, whittled down,
the anthropocene unwound
as we are moulded flat
and packed obliquely back
into our oblong caves …

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How to Break a Hill – 2019, SOFI

I drive through sharp triangles of midmorning shadow
cast by undulations of grey and white sand,
and watch the trees diminish
and whither bucolic,
till only the grandparents of ash-green shrubs remain,
chewed by an infinity of goats,
and the docile kangaroos they are replacing
along the Sturt highway
stretching to the endless horizon,
under a metallic midday sky,
and I wait for something to appear

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Render – 2019, SOFI

Through smoke, casino, fireworks,
strides Merivacton, towering;
his lap-pool heart beats angrily
behind his solar paneling.

Rapacious, gorging parks and figs
and art space past endurance;
his maw consumes six burnt-out pubs
stinking of insurance…

Lakewater – 2018, Cordite

… I believed, back then that
love, far from growing, is a growth,
like algae, like the houses
fusing to the edge of the lake,
a slice of waterfront
that we must race to clutch, at a speed you loathed
until you couldn’t anymore.
Now you and I fly on carbon fiber,
and I want to tell you that I love you, quickly,
before the setting sun pierces the vegetables.