Disha Trivedi

Martha’s Vineyard

On the dock, I think about the money,
how it never glitters like the striper
a boy snatches from the water
with his silent fishing line, how 
it’s the line itself; invisible but motion,
tugging at our heart-harps.
Safety cuts the white pants and the linen,
the straw and salmon dinners,
the conservatism. Mine is the only brown face
that I see today, until the pizza place
where all customers are workers
in unironic Carhartt, speaking Brazilian Portuguese,
and one man stares at me
so deeply I can’t tell whether to be
concerned. How New England marks me
with its white sails. How it drapes
its tributaries on my peers, gold children
of this island, this fisted summer ground.
I hold this little station,
this watchful sloop. Words as
a set of ripples
striped beneath wealth’s catch.
A ship of salt and air.

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Disha Trivedi is from Northern California. Her poetry and fiction appears in Rust & Moth, Rogue Agent, The Women's Issue anthology from The Harvard Advocate and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.