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Her father was in cigars.
It was when she saw his Manila
(which was the most fantastically long 'un)
that she thought to follow pa’s footsteps.
She designed labels showing cigarillos
exploited in most unusual ways
and cards of artists and actors
being inventive with smoke.
These may have increased pa’s sales,
but colour was outranked by taste
in her hierarchy of the senses
and her talents turned to tobacco itself.
Her breasts would tremble when the mix
reached a woody ginger depth
that only she could tease
from the desperate leaves.

On June 2nd 1883, she outdid herself
and rolled a blimp which tasted of sour buttermilk
gone right. My, it was fit for Gabriel,
who, reclining on his harp,
breathed out juniper ether to titillate the thin
air of Heaven’s Heights. Directions
alight on a clear pool with occasional rain
ripples dying from a grey cloudbank; wisps
then will spread out through lung grapes
become salted in the chest’s seaweed,
and tickle and wrench off cilia
to reveal ubernaked pity. Churchill
would later say it was the best ever,
his smile wrying as the bombs
dropped on Dresden shepherdesses
who held ceramic hands nervously
under lightly painted trees.




Jude Cowan Montague is a composer/musician, writer, and artist. Recent albums are available on the Three Legs Duck and Linear Obsessional netlabels. Her first collection of poetry, For the Messengers (Donut Press, 2011), is a study of Reuters news stories throughout 2008 and is based on her day job as a media archivist and film historian. She improvises using electronica and voice on Reuters stories for her monthly show World News Vision on Soundart Radio. She is also one half of the duo Foulkestone, which performs traditional folk songs with electronic instrumentation.
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18 Nov 2024

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In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Little Lila by Susannah Rand, read by Claire McNerney. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
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