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Bernard Ferguson is a Bahamian immigrant poet, an MFA candidate at NYU, a Writers in the Public Schools fellow and an Assistant Editor at Washington Square Review. He is the winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, the 2019 Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Prize and an Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholar. His work is published or forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Common, SLICE Magazine, Pinwheel, Winter Tangerine and Best New Poets 2017. Visit him at https://bernardferguson.com/
The poem and manuscript below were included in the printed program of the 2019 Discovery Winners’ Reading. “my coworker says be productive or be deported” was first published by the Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Festival.
after June Jordan
& there i was, minding my own business
like mama had always warned
me, frozen with surrender before the line
the tulips, rising & ransacking the block
with their beauty
a bouquet of them
mouths agape & leaning
into the sidewalk, pressing outward
in all manners of direction but for one
comrade whose petals had not yet unraveled
despite the gold & the beckoning
bees & the block’s incessant desire
the flower holding its soft limbs
to itself before offering them to our living
biding time & nectar next to what must have been
a friend, a show off, whose many tongues
were splayed & hinting
at what might happen if the lips
were to part & drink
the bounty on the wind today & there,
on the ground, if you were
to lay close to the stubborn thing
& its single foot, you would see its face
pushed against the blue sky, its small fortune
leaning with the clouds
& leaning toward me,
there, where i was
considering the far-flung blue & the flower
& the small border between
tending to what is most mine
my business, for hours & hours
in stillness, listening
for the sound of the few lips
of the tight lipped tulip
pulling apart
Watch the 2019 Winners’ Reading.
