Bullet Points
Bullet Points
By Jericho Brown
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.
Jericho Brown's first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award, his second, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.
Jericho Brown, "Bullet Points" from The Tradition. Copyright © 2019 by Jericho Brown. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.