We bring you a poem about poems (but also not about poems) by Patrick Rosal for the first lit feature of the new year.
I wrote this poem in the summer of 2012, after two unarmed New Yorkers were shot by the police within 24 hours — Reynaldo Cuevas and Walwyn Jackson. I was thinking of Amadou Diallo. I was trying to make sense of what we think of as public competence.