Two Poems from Pebble Swing

Ghazal for Heirloom Family RecipesMy grandmother taught me five different ways to deflesh a bitter gourd,how to scrape off the residue left from seeds so it would taste less bitter.Recipe for old-fashioned liquor: Replace the sugar cube with elderberries.In an ice-filled mixing glass, stir bourbon, St. Germain and bitters. The best coffee was served to me by a young woman at the Ethiopian café—it was sweet on its own, and permeated all the necessary tinges of bitterness. When you leave water in a cup for too long, it evaporates. Can’t saythe same about honey, but it’s beginning to clump. Tea leaves turn bitter. My grandfather died while eating crab and red wine—heart attack.This is a spell we are currently under, but I promise it won’t stay bitter.  Expecting 

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Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). She has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry, Minola Review’s Poetry Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for the New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Wang’s poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and three anthologies, including Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2021). She studies English and world literature at Simon Fraser University and is an editor at Room magazine. Pebble Swing is her debut poetry collection. She lives in Port Moody, BC.