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).