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 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 MoreRickie’s got a foot on my head, I’m holding onto a fistful of his hair and he’s pressing my nose so far back it feels like it’s ramming into my brains. Whenever we get together, he beats the crap out of me. I’ve known Rickie since we were little, since baseball camp, when I had thick glasses and a patch to correct my lazy eye. Sometimes, my eye still goes berserk.
Read MoreYou lay me by the Hudson. By the Prison.
Searchlight tower gone dark in kiddie park.
You came to Ossining to fetch me back.
Drove to Bronx, 2 am, for Kansas Chicken.
But I couldn’t eat, not behind their bullet-
proof glass. Not by grass, nor rocks, nor River.
Undid my strappy shoes and wet my knees.
We used to tease: fish here have three eyes.
You lay me by the Hudson. By the Prison.
Searchlight tower gone dark in kiddie park.
You came to Ossining to fetch me back.
Drove to Bronx, 2 am, for Kansas Chicken.
But I couldn’t eat, not behind their bullet-
proof glass. Not by grass, nor rocks, nor River.
Undid my strappy shoes and wet my knees.
We used to tease: fish here have three eyes.
This piece is a part of WATERFRONTS, a series of personal essays engaging with the waterways of New York and/or Los Angeles, presented in collaboration with Trop.
Read MoreYears ago I had a plan. I lived over a hill from the Hudson River, past Sacred Heart Church, past a crumbling downtown and menacing, empty train station. The river in my town was brown and slick, banked with old cranes and unused piers, the bones of heavy industry. A few miles south, men fished in the water, casting lines off docks across 12th Avenue from Fairway, dropping disc-shaped fish into plastic buckets at their feet. They often stood several yards away from one another, not speaking, not looking over their shoulders at the people with shopping carts and their cars’ negotiations of the narrow parking lot. I was always curious whether the fishermen ate the fish they caught or simply poured the bucket back into the river when they’d gotten bored. The fish were small and yellowish, a discolored silver, something metallic and toxic, and I would not have eaten them.
Read MoreMy idea for getting married on a boat in the Hudson River was, in theory, a good one. It had come to me in a flash one afternoon at Shelter Island where my fiancée Karen and I had gone to scout out possible venues for our wedding. We were hoping to have a ceremony that was simple and secular, quirky but classy, something that incorporated our abiding love and affection for New York City, and also something that didn’t cost too much. Most of these requirements, however, seemed to have little chance of being satisfied by what we had seen during our six hours on Shelter Island, and it wasn’t until evening, while the two of us sat on the shore, depleted and dejected, imagining the worst possible cookie-cutter wedding, that we happened to observe a sailboat serenely floating past.
This is how I remember it: From the park, you could see the sewage flowing out to the Hudson. The seagulls swooped all around the brown discharge. That’s the image: a cloud of gulls, rejoicing in our waste.
This fragment has two parts. The first splashes through the Hudson River one early morning this past September. The second will take place next week, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, inside the canal of my left ear.
Tell me about memory and distance and time. I don’t quite understand how they converge even now, pushing forty. I used to view distance solely in terms of time, used to think any trip that was an hour north was in the same place: visiting cousins in Bergen County, going on trips to museums in the city, venturing off to my dad’s office in North Brunswick. They were all in the neighborhood of an hour from my hometown and, being a child, I never looked at a map, never gleaned where they all were in relation to one another. I thought of everything with a flawed logic, without a sense of space or geometry. That was something I had to learn. It shifted when I went from passenger to driver, changing my relationship to the roads on which I traveled.
From our beginning we've been joined, eager to take up the same space, breathe the same air. In our mother, we acted as one. We were almost born stacked, though that couldn't be. Instead we felt a moment of brief separation, a fissure. When the doctor plucked me from my mother, I reached out for my sister. I had never felt alone.
Read MoreThere were four men on that train in 1865,
and all the other passengers just belongings
and the baggage of stranger souls. A Wednesday
evening. No fog. The signal given as the bridge
divided and the sloop went past.
Read MoreElizabeth L. Bradley has contributed to Underwater New York, Salon, Smithsonian.com, and Gothamist. "Water" is excerpted from her new history, "New York," by permission of Reaktion Books, London, England (please note Anglicized spelling throughout). "New York" is available for purchase here.
Read MoreAll these white people with blankets and bottles of wine and bits of cheese were camped out along the river to see the tall ships. It was hot as fuck, New York summer wet, with the stink of garbage and something worse, something I don't have a name for.
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.
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