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Monday – Martin Luther King Day
One shift we have witnessed under the Trump administrations is white liberals finally awakening to a reality that people of color have long known: when the powers that be assume authoritarian powers, Constitutional rights and equal treatment under the law are illusions. That reality was slammed home through the ICE shooting of Nicole Renee Good and the Justice Department’s laughable cover-up.
Martin Luther King used non-violent resistance to win the public over to his side during the Civil Rights movement, and Minneapolis protesters are taking a page from his tactics. Meanwhile, reenacting the role of Bull Connor and others, ICE is doing all it can to goad people into giving Trump an excuse to send in the military.
In “Bullet Points,” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown uses bitter sarcasm to cast doubt on police explanations for Black deaths. Thanks to cell phone witnesses, the broader public is finally coming around to his view. For all its grim humor, the poem ends on a heartbreaking personal note: the life of the victim is ultimately about tears of the bereft.
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 that we’ve been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can play a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
