Bernard Ferguson (they/them) is a Bahamian poet, essayist and educator whose work has been featured in The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and elsewhere. Bernard is currently working on a book of nonfiction, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2024), about Hurricane Dorian and the effects of climate change on Small-Island Developing States across the world.
Photo by Bayan Kiwan
Read MoreThe photographs in Down For the Day (2016-present) are made along a fifteen block stretch of Rockaway Beach, Queens. Less than a mile long, this section of beach is among the most utilized in New York City, hosting shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on summer weekends. The project title, Down For the Day, is the local description of day-trippers, frequently called DFDs. This term of derision, often meant to distance visitors from locals, is used here to describe the tangled bodies, cramped encampments, and flimsy tropical umbrellas as attempts at finding not only respite from the city heat, but perhaps a momentary paradise, imperfect but one’s own.
Read MoreThe scene opens on the Rockaway Park subway station. Upstage, there’s a bench and a transit toolbox-- a rectangular metal container similar to the bench in height and length. In the background, we hear seagulls calling and the sound of waves. The station is just a short walk from Rockaway Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. We hear a train pull into the station and then a voice over a loudspeaker.
Read MoreIn 1905, a group of indigenous people from the Philippines were displayed at Coney Island’s Luna Park as a spectacle for curious visitors. Truman Hunt, former lieutenant governor of the Bontoc region in the Philippines during the American occupation, recruited native Igorot from the region and offered compensation of $15 a month to showcase their customs and culture to the American public.
Read MoreFirst Contact is an installation and media performance-in-progress. The basis of the piece is the 1759–1769 correspondence between Medford, Massachusetts slave trader Timothy Fitch and the captains who sailed his ships. These letters offer an opportunity to examine the irrevocable point of contact between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and between British settlers and enslaved Africans, whose contact, collision, and conflict will eventually produce the ‘Americans’.
Read MoreThe ocean has many colors. Whenever I look into its blue or green or gray or foaming white face, I think it’s telling a story. It’s remembering something, splashing together lost histories. What does froth murmur?
The Atlantic is childhood.
The Pacific is youth.
The year I was born, a hurricane made landfall on Long Island that sent gray Atlantic waves gobbling up the sand and slamming against the building where my family lived. We had a third floor apartment that faced the sea, nothing but a strip of beach between us. When I got a little older, my father would take me onto our terrace during storms to see bolts of lightning slice the water, or watch as the ocean slowly swallowed the sun.
Read MoreYou dive off the boat tank first.
The flippered feet lie flat then flip
a half circle, like a rush hour fuel gauge
falling from Full to Empty.
