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 More36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013–present) is a series of nine site-specific participatory performances and video artworks, taking place in nine different bodies of water around the world. In each, I stand in a tidal area for a full tidal cycle as water slowly engulfs my body and then recedes. The public participates in all aspects of making the work. Each work in the series consists of a live performance event, a long-form cinematic video work, and varied ephemera. The project examines the temporary nature of all things and our contemporary relationship with water in urban environments—as individuals, as communities, and as a species.
Read MoreEinstein once described quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance,” an invisible world of atoms that is composed of even smaller particles that can be moved and affected without being touched. The imperceptible energy exchanges and mysterious movements between these subatomic particles can also be affected in more than one place at one time and can occur thousands of miles apart.
Read MoreTwo days before my due date, I executed a slow roll to get up off the couch where I’d been resting and felt a rush of water dampen my leggings. I’d had the same sensation earlier that morning when climbing out of bed. On the phone with the nurse though, I couldn’t confirm the word “rush,” nor the word “water.” Even so, she said, I’d better come in.
Read MoreThe American newsboy was born in New York. This was no chance occurrence. With a population of more than 200,000, “Gotham” was the largest city in North America. Its year-round harbor had long made it a bustling port, but the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 transformed it into a continental center of trade, finance, and manufacture.
Read MoreWell then down you go. Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.
Read MoreThe man took off his white t-shirt, then removed what looked like a gold chain from around his neck. Balancing on one leg, then the other, he pulled off his white sneakers and lined them up on the wooden boardwalk. Lastly, he laid aside his cell phone, on which he had just been talking, vaulted over the railing, and jumped. We heard the thud of his body hitting the water and the shouts that followed. No one looked prepared to jump in, but everyone had their phones out, ready to call 911. If the police had cared to ask, I would’ve said he was in his thirties, black, thin and wiry, and here the semi-certainties would have ended.
Read MoreI’ve worked on ships.
I can talk about ballast and ratlines and know that, dreamy as it sounds, starboard just means “right” like “port” means left, like “bow” means front and “stern” means back. If I imagine my body as a mast, my outstretched arms are a yard, a horizontal beam where a sail would hang. I’ve walked on decks, not floors, stepped over knee knockers rather than through doors. I can identify the correct tool for splicing rope, which isn’t called rope on a ship—it’s called a line. I’ve never called a ship a “she.”
thirteenth day
a loom
a rag
a rug
the sky
a skydyed
blue theres
always a ticket
says the man
taking tickets
1848
Of all us hotel souls, burdened and bound to the Parkers by birth or debt or a blindered need of work, you’re the one the world will fail. Like the headlines you hawked before you landed here – two cents a week, two weeks two weeks too many you said – chance and place will collude to kill you:
Read MoreSarah Mostow wrote and illustrated an artists’ book inspired by what lies beneath the surface of the river, and by her own personal history with the Hudson. Each page contains an original painting or drawing depicting such images as a dead giraffe, Henry Hudson’s ship the Half Moon, and a view of the River seen from Sarah’s childhood home.
Read MoreOne of my favorite things about Underwater New York is that all of these strange, evocative objects we collect in our list, objects that have no business being beside each other on dry land, coexist underwater. I sketched some of my favorites so they would be beside each other here, too.
Read MoreCarcasses is about the various cars that have come to their final resting place in the waters surrounding New York City. The movement of the car-shaped plexiglas pieces strung together as a mobile is how I like to imagine these cars slowly sinking down to the bottom.
Read MoreWell then down you go. Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.
Read MoreCarcasses is about the various cars that have come to their final resting place in the waters surrounding New York City. The movement of the car-shaped plexiglas pieces strung together as a mobile is how I like to imagine these cars slowly sinking down to the bottom.
Read MoreWhen the greenish lights hit the smoke rising from the DJ booth, it formed a noxious cloud. If you dance inside it, you die, Alice decided. They were there at the behest of someone called Darien, a stick figure given life and stringy black hair. Elyse had sent him for drinks.
Read MoreI took the sea to the C
searching for ghosts at Dead Horse beach
a ship appeared to me
I swam out so I could see
"Come aboard my darlin
it's the last time I'll be callin
come aboard and sail with me."
Read MoreWatching the construction downtown from my roof
Allyson says it’s a fish decomposing:
the spotlights a spine
the floors rib bones piling up across the river.
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