Taper

Taper is an online literary magazine for tiny computational poems (under 2 kilobytes), published by Bad Quarto. I have been contributing since Spring 2022, and my pieces follow in reverse chronological order.

Taper #11: Parallels, Fall 2023

Smoke Signals is a participatory poem that invites the reader to transmit messages to loved ones who have passed on to the spirit realm. The piece is a nod to wind phones, which make space for grieving visitors to hold one-way conversations with their dead. Referencing the Chinese tradition of burning incense as offerings to the departed, transmissions are rendered as ephemeral smoke, rising from joss sticks that gather in parallel with each message sent. The digital incense sticks appear to burn down and recede from view, mirroring our own brief timelines in our parallel sphere of the living.

Taper #10: Powers of Ten, Spring 2023

In the tarot, the tenth Major Arcana card is the Wheel of Fortune. Throughout history, people have turned their gazes toward the sky (天, ten) in order to divine their fortunes. This piece, X/十/10: Wheel of Fortune, features a Wheel of Fortune drawn with the shapes of X, 十, and 10, all glyphs for the number ten, dividing the wheel into ten segments. A play on astrological charts, a spin of the wheel generates a visual poem in the form of a constellation of stars and words (the latter all containing the letters “ten”). The reader is invited to use this piece as a divination tool: inquire with a question or concern, interpret meaning in the generated poem, and gain insight.

Taper #9: Nine Lives, Fall 2022

K9-tailed is a durational visual poem that unfurls over time. The Chinese word for the number nine, 九, is a homophone for 久, a word signifying a long period of time; in Chinese culture, the number nine is associated with longevity and eternity. The mythical nine-tailed fox, originating in Chinese mythology and appearing in various forms throughout East Asian folklore, is said to grow each of its tails over a long lifetime, gaining shapeshifting abilities and magical powers with each one, and eventually ascending to the heavens after 999 years. As you remain on the page, the virtual canine’s tails, each formed by the 9 glyph, slowly fade into view, with each tail taking longer than the last. If you wait long enough, you can witness the fox transform into a golden celestial being. The poem reaches completion within minutes, but per our expectations for the web, the process seems to take forever.

Taper #8: 8-Bit Nostalgia, Spring 2022

A Compass of Lunar Trigrams is part of my ongoing multimedia explorations of ancestral motifs through a diasporic lens. As the word “nostalgia” in this issue’s prompt derives from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “grief,” this piece borrows from the visual language of the octagonal feng shui mirror (a protective talisman for the home) and the compass (a magnetic wayfinding device originally invented in Han Dynasty China for divinatory purposes). The auspicious number 8 also appears through the ba gua (eight trigrams) of Taoist cosmology, and the eight phases of the Moon (culturally and linguistically associated with home, family, and timekeeping). UTF-8 encodes these symbols and emoji for the web, allowing them to be displayed here with minimal impact to the file size constraints.