The day after we hear that a veteran police officer in a Minneapolis suburb fatally shot an unarmed Black man at a traffic stop because she allegedly mistook her service weapon for a taser gun, and after news broke that a uniformed Black National Guard officer—who was pepper sprayed, handcuffed and threatened during a December traffic stop in a hick Virginia town—has filed a federal lawsuit against the two cops at the scene and the town of Windsor…well, it seems appropriate to have “Bullet Points”, by Jericho Brown as our National Poetry Month entry.
Brown won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection The
Tradition. If it matters, in addition to being Black, he’s gay and
HIV-positive.
“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.
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