Size / / /

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.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: