Had Timothy Loehmann, the police officer who shot and killed Rice, taken more time to examine the toy gun Rice was playing with, he would have noticed that it was a pellet gun and Rice wasn’t threatening anyone with it. Loehmann didn’t. While nothing can undo Loehmann’s lack of attention, Vuong’s “Toy Boat” is clearly interested in examining the titular toy closely and carefully. The speaker pays careful attention to the toy because a lack of this kind of observation and scrutiny contributed to Rice’s death.

The first stanza notes the toy’s color: “yellow plastic / black sea” (Lines 1-2). The second stanza examines the toy’s shape and placement: “eye-shaped shard / on a darkened map” (Lines 3-4). The boat is further described in stanza five:

        toy boat—oarless

        each wave

        a green lamp

        outlasted (Lines 14-17).

The scrutiny the poem gives to the titular toy boat is not reparative, it cannot bring Rice back to life. Nonetheless, the poem is making an argument that this type of attentiveness is important. In the future, careful observation could help prevent another child from being shot to death with a real gun while holding a toy one, thus attention is an important theme of the poem.