ær’d

Issue 22 - 12/20/24


Table of Contents


hot aer: things from the editors

campbell mccormack, maisie quinn, and ryan stumacher


the plan

the holiday issue! we the editors are off on two blessed weeks of break, and we thought we’d leave you with some thought nuggets to marinate on in your spare time. don’t think too hard about that sentence. happy holidays and happy solstice – remember, dear readers, that things will only get brighter from here. 


the good

deep couches, a long moment of respite, the fruits of your labor, getting gas with friends, the advisory groupchat, german fairytales, queer brooklyn, footnotes, humidifiers, homecomings, eloquence, the vegas golden knights, meaghan’s new house


the bad

shallow couches, in-text citations, oversleeping, insurance man being stupid, being taken by surprise, quarter tanks, the philadelphia flyers, fractions to decimals, jeans digging into my internal organs, necklace breaking, having a cold


the ugly

stained couches, the chain rule, virgil’s olive sapling, chapped lips, watching a teenage boy fully pick his nose in the library right now, auditioning, electrical fires, jewelry caught in sweaters, politics, shoes untying after you just tied them, having a uterus


dedication

maisie quinn


Once, you asked me: “Is it true you’re not afraid

of spiders? I thought everyone hated them, you know, legs and eyes and things.” 


That day, the sunset dazzled, 

fractured on the surface of the lake—

my world was croaks and calls and molten color and 

you were at its center, 

quizzical, beautiful, half-laughing.


So I said “Yeah, I’m not afraid

of them, I don’t get all the fuss. They’re just 

another kind of bug.” 


But after webs of city streets and arguments and coarse concrete,

midday, midsummer smog which snared the sun

and left us both in darkness—

you know I lied.


And now, too late, I’ll tell the truth.

These poems are yours. Take them, or if you don’t want them

give them to those girls still laughing on the lake.


tradition

amelia swedloff


A list of holiday traditions that I continue to do because they bring me joy.


I. The Christmas Tree

Every year, my sister and dad get a Christmas tree from the same place on a street corner. The trees are not the best trees. They could be fuller or rounder or greener. Yet, every year the two of them venture out, rain or shine, to tie a tree to the roof of our car and drag it home. It frightens my anxious dog and upsets my dad’s allergies, but my sister loves doing it. 


II. Christmas Cookies

I love peanut butter blossoms. Do you know the peanut butter cookies with a Hershey kiss on top? Enough said. 


III. Ice Skating

Since eighth grade, my friends from middle school and I have gone ice skating at Dilworth Park. It’s not the best ice rink in the city, but it was the closest to our middle school. The food is overpriced and the lockers are too small to fit our backpacks, but every year we drink the too-hot hot chocolate and shove coats and boots and backpacks into one locker and pray we don’t forget the code. Then, we walk around Christmas Village in the cold. We’ve gone through so much there. I got fake married on the ice. I’ve cried in the food tent. I’ve almost thrown up on the Ferris wheel. We’ve celebrated birthdays and thanksgivings and Christmases and so much more. It’s the only tradition we still do, but by god we will do it


IV. Church

I haven’t been to a Christmas service in many years, but we used to go all of the time when I was a kid. Since then, both of my mom’s Catholic parents have passed away, so there is no longer any reason for us to celebrate the Birth of Christ with anything other than presents. The services used to be boring and 5-year-old Amelia couldn’t sit still long enough, but she loved lighting a candle at the end of every service. At the back of my grandparents church, there was a table of candles that you could light in prayer for someone you loved. All you had to do was insert a quarter and press a button and the candle would magically light up. 5-year-old Amelia loved lighting candles.


V. Decorating the Tree

My family is not special, we decorate our Christmas tree just like anyone else. But, just like anyone else, we have special traditions that make it just for us. Every year my sister and I argue about who’s year it is to put the star on the tree (somehow it’s always her year). We use my late grandmother’s fancy Filipino ornaments side-by-side with the shoddily made pipe-cleaner/pom pom ones I made with my dad’s mom when I was two. My dad asks if I remember having made them and insists on telling me the story I’ve heard time and time again. Then he jokes about inviting my old friend to help decorate the tree. The two of us haven’t talked in seven years, since I left that school. But before those seven years, we spent nine together through preschool and elementary school. There are pictures of us in princess dresses unwrapping Hershey’s kisses to make peanut butter blossoms. She was Jewish, so she never decorated a Christmas tree, but every year she would ask to help with ours. We never found the time.


VI. The Menorah

Growing up, most of my friends and my sisters’ friends were Jewish. We went to Jewish summer camp. Our dad was raised Jewish, but our mom was raised Catholic, and her parents were much more into Catholicism than my dad’s family is into Judaism. Nevertheless, my sister and I wanted to feel included and connected to what our friends and family would do during the holidays. My parents' solution was to light a Menorah every night of Hanukkah. It’s not perfect, we still don’t go to synagogue and we still aren’t “really” Jewish, but seven-year-old Amelia and her sister loved it, and we still do.


VII. Caroling

When I was a kid, we used to go caroling every year. I don’t remember how it started, but for at least five years, a bunch of families in my neighborhood would wander around on a Friday night and knock on people’s doors to sing off-key holiday music at them. It was my favorite part of the year, I loved getting to feel like I was out past my bedtime. I loved getting to sing. I loved when people would open their doors and excite at the group of people standing outside. Some years, we would even end up in a nearby park for hot chocolate and donuts. We don’t carol in our neighborhood anymore. All of the kids in those families have since grown up and become too cool to walk around singing at people. Now I carol with the school choir and we sing up and down through Chestnut Hill. Today, my Latin class ran around the school and sang to different classes in a language none of them could understand. But it didn’t matter. I still got to feel like I was getting away with not being in class and I still got to sing and I still got to see people laugh when we tripped over the words we didn’t know well enough.

on footnotes

campbell mccormack


While writing a lab report the other day, I had a conversation with my biology teacher about the merits of tradition. Initially, I approached him to ask if I could use Chicago style citations in my paper, rather than APA — personal preference. He said yes, so long as my formatting was correct, and I went on a brief tangent about the value of footnotes over in-text citations, until he interrupted me. 


“You can’t use footnotes,” he said. 


“What? Why not?”


“We don’t use footnotes in science.”


“That is such bullshit,” I told him (not in quite so many words). And, of course, it is. Because what’s the real difference between in-text and footnote style citations? Both function to give credit to those who originally birthed whatever ideas you’re regurgitating into the Universe, and to ensure that you’re not accused of plagiarism or forgery. Why does it matter how I type those things onto the page? They’re arbitrary! They’re not even part of my argument!


“It’s tradition,” my teacher said. 


I eventually acquiesced to reformat my paper, because citations are a stupid hill to die on. But before my teacher moved on, I said, “Doing something for tradition’s sake is one of the most pointless things a person can do.” 


“That’s a bold statement,” my teacher said. His eyebrows leapt up his face (honestly, I could write a whole essay about this guy and how funky he is (in a good way?)). 


I know it’s a bold statement, but I believe that saying bold things just for the sake of saying them is also pointless. If I say something bold, I say it with my chest. So here, dear reader, is why I believe that traditions need not be upheld just because:


I have never had a particularly close relationship with my paternal grandparents. They’ve always lived in New Jersey, just a state away from my siblings and I, and when I was younger we frequently took trips to see them at their ranch-style house in a retirement community. I have nice memories with them. Pleasant ones. Once, my grandfather bought me a magnetic fishing pole with fake pink fish and taught me how to “catch” them in the artificial pond behind his home. He and my grandmother were always loving and warm. That aside, they were never the people I ran to for advice, or for comfort. 


As I grew older, I stopped asking to see them, and they stopped asking my parents to bring me over. We still saw each other at holidays, at whole family barbeques and birthday parties, and even sometimes on a whim, when my dad decided to drive up to Jersey for the day and take my siblings and me along. But we had already begun to drift. 


When I was ten or eleven, my parents went away for the weekend and my grandparents volunteered to babysit me in their absence. Coincidentally, one of the biggest snowstorms of the decade hit Pennsylvania over that weekend, knocking out all of the power and heat in my neighborhood and effectively barricading us from the outside world. 


To keep a long story short, I took a walk with my friend once the snow had stopped falling and my babysitter — who my parents had hired to supplement my grandparents’ supervision — didn’t know where we had gone. She drove around the neighborhood searching for us and, when she found nothing, she called the police and reported us missing. The entire community engaged in a search — neighbors trekked through the snow and called my name, my brother flagged down cars to look for my bright blue coat, police cruisers combed the icey suburban streets — except for my grandparents, who sat in their car with the engine running and the heat on blast, unmoving in my driveway. 


I was, of course, perfectly fine, and had never been kidnapped or frozen in a snowbank as my babysitter had begun to fear. That aside, this incident was the beginning of the fundamental changing of my relationship with my grandparents. At ten years old, I thought to myself, Why weren’t they out there looking for me?


In the seven years that have since passed, I have grown further and further from my grandparents. I came to political and moral consciousness. I came out as gay and then as trans. I formed my own opinions that differed greatly from theirs. Seeing my grandparents became an obligation. Earlier this year, it came to light that my grandmother believes that being gay is a choice — and it’s the wrong one, at that. 


Prior to this Thanksgiving, I had a conversation with my mom about my relationship with our extended family. “I love my cousins,” I told her — and I do! I really do! — “but I feel like the adults don’t make any effort to understand me.” I think many people feel this way about aunts and uncles and grandparents: they perform pleasantries and know you on a surface level, then identify you with a single interest or hobby or talent and stick to that for years at a time. 


A brief aside: once, my maternal grandmother sent t-shirts to my siblings and I. My sister’s had two oars crossing over her heart to signify her love for rowing. My brother’s had a bad science pun on it, because he’s an aerospace engineer. Mine had a big rainbow heart on it because I’m a giant dyke. 


“Why do I even still see these people?” I asked my mom. 


“They’re your family!” she said. “Families spend Thanksgiving together. It’s tradition”


Thanksgiving day started on the right foot and ended as a double amputee. In the early afternoon, I had a vibrant conversation with one aunt about our shared love for coffee and waking up early, which was even followed by a text the next morning saying that she’d enjoyed our talk. Crazy stuff! My other aunt gave me tips on my crocheting and offered me her Michael’s employee discount so that I could buy more yarn. My cousins and I shared our disastrous ID photos and talked about the hypothetical house we’d all live in together one day. Perhaps, I thought, this is what family looked like. 


Before we all sat down for dinner, I spoke briefly with my grandmother. She congratulated me on getting into college, I said thanks, she asked me what I wanted to major in, I said English and theatre, she asked me what I wanted to do for work, I said I wanted to teach. 


“I guess you’re not interested in making money, then!” she exclaimed, laughing. 


Yikes. 


She and I ended up sitting directly across from one another at dinner. As I sat down, she remarked, “Are you really going to eat all of that food?”


“Maybe not! But it all looked so good, I had to try a bit of everything.”


I chatted to my cousin about their job and their new apartment. I passed the biscuits down the table. During a lull in conversation, I heard my grandmother say to my aunt, “Campbell’s brother is working in such an up-and-coming field! Always new jobs, more money, we’re just so proud of him.”


Ouch. 


Time passed. “Campbell, that’s so much food you’ve got there.”


“Not as hungry as you thought, hm? So much food on your plate!”


“You’re really going to eat all that?”


I began to wonder if my grandmother was trying to prove that she had not yet gone blind. Perhaps she thought that if she remarked upon the amount of food I was eating enough times during the meal, we’d all think she was fully in control of her facilities. 


In a slightly awkward moment of silence, I attempted to break the tension by complimenting my mother’s cooking. 


“Nobody’s talking, that’s how you know the food is good!” I said.


“Well, you haven’t shut up all night,” my grandmother scoffed.


Scattered laughter. 


I set down my fork as my appetite left me. Who even was this creature sitting across from me? Was she the stern yet loving woman who raised my dad and ran a restaurant at the same time? Was she the nurturing mentor who practically moved in with my mom when she was struggling with newborn twins? Was she the doting grandmother who had set me down for a nap in her spare bedroom with a kiss on my forehead? 


Was she ever that woman? Or did I make her up? 


When dinner was over, I fled to my room and sobbed so hard my nose bled. I hated her. I hated myself for letting her get to me. I hated the fact that she was in my house in the first place, and for nothing more than the sake of tradition. 


I have reached a place in my life where I feel mature enough to take the initiative of deciding who I do and don’t consider family. That woman who inspired me to cry myself dry and wonder if maybe I do talk too much and eat too much and maybe I should consider a more stable career path, who believes that I have made the wrong “choice” by being queer — she is not my family anymore. Any of the roles that she might have fulfilled as my grandmother have been comfortably staffed by mentors and teachers and advisors for years now. I do not need her. 


When I recounted this story to a room full of queer people earlier today, I came close to crying. I hate to cry in public, and as I looked up and to the side, endeavoring to get to the end of my spiel without my eyes leaking emotions all over my face, someone got up from across the room and fetched a box of tissues, pressing it into my lap. In my periphery, I saw a friend reach out toward me and so I offered him the box, but he shook his head and pushed it away, and he then picked up my hand instead. 


He rubbed his thumb against the back of my palm and I was reminded of when he and I held hands in the midst of a crowd flooding the parking lot of the Wells Fargo Center after a hockey game, clinging to one another like flotsam to the crest of a wave. I thought of how he has followed me up to the peaks of my happiness and down to the troughs of my despair. How we have held each other through so much. How much value he brings to my life. I thought of how he called me from the glasses store to ask if I liked a pair of frames, because I know him and he knows me and we trust each other. 


When I told him about my experience with my grandmother, he did not hesitate to say, “Next year, you’ll come to Thanksgiving at my house.” 


That is family, far more than any bond I ever fostered for the sake of blood.


So, when my biology teacher told me that in-text citations are simply “tradition” within the world of scientific writing, I was rightfully miffed. I was prepared to mount the battlements of behalf of footnotes, because fuck tradition for tradition’s sake, fuck doing things because everyone before me has done them like that, and fuck the woman who was once my grandmother. 


Sometimes, free will and a conscience are all that we have. So make your own decisions. Don’t do things just because everyone else has already done them. Exercise your soul, people! Use the goddamned footnotes! 


And, maybe take the time to acknowledge the family whose ties are not writ in biology and law. Those best friends, those neighbors, those teachers and mentors — they are just as important. Imagine them around your Thanksgiving table — doesn’t that just make you smile? 

a monologue of an alien observer

siegfried liu


As I sit in this chair, with three screens in front of me, I cannot differentiate whether my circumstance is deafening or silent. With every blink of my eye I feel toxins accumulating at the front of my skull, questioning whether this is some sickly delirium. Nothing could have prepared me for the unnerving sequence of events which I witnessed, and neither was able to guide me through the internal turmoil which my fellows and I will be sharing for years to come. Numbers and colors and anchors flashing on my screen scrambling to find another batch of hope to add to the pile, aware or not that the stash had been moved and diminished, flown away in the air as the hopeful optimists leap and reach, willingly falling to their demise.

It would be false to claim that indications for this abysmal prospect were not present, yet in our communal conversations we found common ground, which perhaps led to a more upbeat anticipation to the event that would come. I am one of those people who grabbed onto shifting numerals and took it as truth, allowing it to bring myself soaring in the air with aspirations of the future. Now I realize my naive foolishness bestowed upon me by both my youth and peers. 

Despite the disappointment brought forth upon me by my folly, never for a moment have I lamented the possession of such quality. The harshness of reality is blatant, thus apt for a person of my age to adapt to it over the course of their lifetime. However, in my humble opinion, the growth of both society and said young persons is the fruit that yields from the constant struggles against each other, enabling energy and reality to engender its counterpart. The greatest accomplishment one can achieve in this moment is by taking care of both the physical and mental self of themselves and people around. Preservation of human spirits relies on the dexterity of the mind, which links to the conditions of one’s body. Allow me to indulge us in a glass of champagne for exhibitions of resilience and hope. The final gift from Pandora serves as the ultimate motivation for human actions, and it is both beneficial and innate for its preservation. Hope is the lone candle held at one’s chest through a long night’s walk into the unknown.

The train of time continues to drive forward without guidance, yearning for the conducting of noble souls. In an age deprived of voices, steady steering hands are unusual to come upon, and even more unusual to gather in such numbers. With the candle in one hand, and the other finds orientation to where the light directs, and acts upon the inner calling.

I unfortunately am not able to participate in steering, due to my identity as an alien and the helm understandably foreign to me. However, I am not alone in the circumlocutious trek involuntarily embarked on. Perhaps we all have migrated to England, where a U-turn requires a sharp right. Or perchance we come forth a city, where citizens within wish to leave, and travelers outside wish to enter. We will be remembered for tonight, and merely tonight, unless the spirits of humans are depleted refusing to replenish.

I wish the best upon you and I, in hope that no matter whether you are the person who arrives, lingers, or departs, you will both bask and build for us and the people behind us.


Sincerely,

Your E.T. Friend



designated route of transportation: drot

tessa brockman


Hugh Ryan has introduced so many pieces of queer history that I speak to my past.  I lived in Jersey City when I was first born and I grew up in Harlem until I was 10 years old, when we moved to Philly. I have always been very invigorated with Harlem specifically. Ryan’s novel When Brooklyn Was Queer has taught me so much about the people who had to fight to make their place in society, and how New York City was a safe place of residence for them. New York City has changed my way of thinking about the world. 


In particular, Mabel Hampton’s way of living has amazed me. Hampton was a profound activist, and lesbian. Hampton arrived on the queer scene in New York when the subway prices were decreased from 10 cents to 5 cents in the 1900s. This was a time when the subway flourished with popularity. New Yorkers started to realize the opportunities and adventures that could unfold when they took the subway just across town to Greenwich village. Hampton, and many other lesbians at the time, started to take the subway to explore different parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. She would go to Harlem for the clubs, Greenwich Village for apartment parties, and Coney Island for entertainment and for work. Hampton even took the subway to Jersey City and found a family to take her in. 


Hampton was prominent around the time of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She lived a rich life enjoying the entertainment in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The entertainment world had Hampton experimenting and meeting with many different women. She had several flirtations with queer identifying people but at the time did not know there was a label for them. The queer people she met helped her find her way into the scene to support her and to help her find more parties and jobs to reach out to. In New York, the more people you knew, the more your popularity grew and the events increased. Specifically, she met a woman named Joan Nestle. They started seeing each other, even though Joan was married to a man at the time. Joan was the first woman to refer to herself as a lesbian in front of Mabel, who did not know what Joan was referring to. 


I enjoyed When Brooklyn Was Queer profoundly. The history of Harlem is limitless. I have known very much about the Harlem Renaissance, specifically the music aspect of it, but I have learned very little about the queer culture seen there. It is impactful and meaningful to me to learn about how Harlem has become such a welcoming place to the queer community. I am very proud that I consider myself to be from such a remarkable place. To hear about Hampton commuting back and forth from Jersey City, to Harlem, to Greenwich and then to Coney Island makes me think about my childhood and how I would take the subway to and from Harlem to my lower school everyday. The subways were my lifeline when I was a child. Many of my passions now, I have found when taking the subway – theatre and music, mostly. 


It is beneficial for me to read about all of these queer artists finding their passions through the subway because that is what moved me when I was a child. If it was not for the subway, Mabel Hampton, Joan Nestle, and Deb Edel, these three heavily important queer activists, would not have found themselves and their professions. They would not have met and experimented and fallen in love with women. The subway is an ordinary transportation device in New York, but it is so much more than that. It gave those women the opportunity to pursue their professions, find love and experiment, and to find their identity. The subway created the idea that women in New York could have a choice with what to do with their lives. What job to pursue, what person they fell in love with, without having to deal with the loud homophobia that surrounded the U.S.A. 


Those queer individuals have paved the way for us. As I rode the subway in New York I had the chance to find my passions and who I was, while those lesbians had to go out and find their right to be who they are. New York City has always been a comforting place in my heart, and it moves me to see these people's connections with my designated route. The subway is not just some transportation system, it helps the people in need.

#, vol. three

julius d. levy, et al.