Bullet Points

Brown’s “Bullet Points” was written in 2015, after a series of troubling deaths of Black citizens in encounters with police. Talking to Ellen Wachtel for CBC Radio, Brown noted that the deaths of Jesus Huerta, Victor White III, and Sandra Bland specifically influenced him: “When I wrote the poem, I was thinking about the supposed suicides of people of color while in police custody” (Wachtel, Eleanor. “Jericho Brown's Prize-Winning Poetry Speaks With Power and Urgency About Racism and Violence.” CBC Radio, 2020). As a lyric, the poem measures the personal effect such cultural and political moments have on a person, specifically centering on Brown’s own identity as a Black man.

Brown begins the poem with a litany of refusals—an anti-suicide note to show his loved ones that, as he told Wachtel, “if I do kill myself, you won't have to wonder. I won't leave you in a situation where you have to wonder if I did so in police custody” (Wachtel). The repetitive phrase “I will not” (Lines 1, 2, 3, 5) negates the possibility of suicide, which Brown assures us he won’t attempt. He will neither pursue the methods recently used by police—“shoot[ing] myself / in the head” (Lines 1-2); “shoot[ing] myself / in the back” (Lines 2-3); “hang[ing] myself / with a trashbag” (Lines 3-4)—nor die by suicide in locations where these incidents have occurred, such as “in a police car while handcuffed” (Line 6) or “in a jail cell” (Line 7).

This series of methods and locations—the “bullet points” of police brutality—contains objective reporting and intimately personal reaction. The list refers directly to historical events. For example, as Brown pointed out to Wachtel, “there’s video footage of [Bland]—and then suddenly there's technical difficulty and the video goes out at the moment that she supposedly hung herself with a trash bag” (Wachtel). Similarly, it was suspicious that White, while “handcuffed sitting in the backseat of a police cruiser, somehow managed to shoot himself in his upper back” (Wachtel). In the poem, Brown’s direct imagery and diction then makes the horror of these deaths vivid. First-person narration makes these events personal: The titular “bullet points” are also the gunshot wounds on the bodies Brown is mourning—Brown is not simply recounting the news, but speaking with sympathy as a Black man who might find himself similarly dubiously dead.

Brown then considers what is due to the bodies of the dead. While religious and societal tradition holds that bodies be treated with respect and ceremony, Brown considers police treatment of their victims to be even more profane than the devouring process of nature’s scavengers:

I trust the maggots

Who live beneath the floorboards

Of my house to do what they must

To any carcass (Lines 11-14).

Consumption by carrion eaters is horrifying and dehumanizing—it reduces a dead person to a “carcass” (Line 14)—but less so than murder at the hands of an authority figure. Brown accepts this decomposition “more than I trust / An officer of the law of the land / To shut my eyes” (Lines 14-16) because such an officer will not “shut my eyes like a man / Of God might [or] cover me with a sheet / So clean my mother could have used it / to tuck me in” (Lines 17-19). While most people would act in tender, respectful ways around a deceased body, the corrupt police officer would not.

Brown then describes several modern ways of dying that play with recent health recommendations: Despite the fact that each of these is an avoidable death, he would much rather die from smoking, choking, or freezing in the cold, “the same way most Americans do” (Lines 20-21)—in other words, with the freedom to make choices, even bad ones that are akin to slow suicide. This is a deliberate contrast to a death in which one is not given a choice. Brown insists “if you hear / of me dead anywhere near / a cop, then that cop killed me” (Lines 25-27). This highlights the power and choice removed from those who killed in incidents of police brutality.

Imagery next suggests that the actions taken by violent police officers are a failure to honor the community and the sanctity of life. Any police officer who kills him performs an antisocial act: “He took / Me from us and left my body” (Lines 27-28). This division of the “body” from the person, Brown suggests, obliterates what is priceless: human life and security; the departure of “me” from the larger body of “us” is a community-wide travesty.

Nevertheless, even when disrespected by maggots or mistreatment at the hands of police, that body is “greater than the settlement / A city can pay a mother to stop crying” (Lines 30-31). Human grief cannot be stemmed by suing the government who employs willfully violent policemen. While financial reparations might be necessary, they do not reanimate the dead.

Moreover, a “new bullet / Fished from the folds of my brain” (Lines 32-33) cannot be as “beautiful” (Line 32) as a still living man. By ending with this image, Brown forces his readers to reimagine the brutal ends to the lives of Jesus Huerta, Victor White III, and Sandra Bland, while contemplating the fact that as a Black man, Brown could easily become a victim as well. This highlights the waste of human life and the affront on dignity such actions exacerbate. The sympathy acts a call for the poem’s audience to help make such crimes stop.