Black Poetry Tuesdays (August 8, 2023 Edition): "Bullet Points” by Jericho Brown
Trigger warning: anti-Blackness, hate crimes, murder.
The week’s Black Poetry Tuesdays piece is from Jericho Brown. Brown is a Black U.S. American poet, writer, and professor. Brown's first book, Please, won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament, was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal and received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The following piece is called “Bullet Points.” In this piece, Brown focuses on the reality of police brutality in Black communities in the United States. This piece is partly in response to the suspicious deaths of multiple Black people while in police custody in 2018 and 2019, but also a dissertation on Black bodies murdered by the police with no justice and accountability. Jericho weaves a message to his Black friends and family, asking them to fight for justice if he dies in police custody because his demise will not be self-inflicted. “Bullet Points” is heavy, genuine, honest, and brutal and generates, sadly, familiar feelings of powerlessness in the face of constant danger, wearing a veil of public safety.
Bullet Points
I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we've been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
You can learn more about Jericho here.