Bullet Points

The title of Brown’s poem conjures up two distinct images. The first is an easy-to-understand, shorthand list: Bullet points are often used to highlight the significant ideas of a proposition, a collection of evidence, or a logical sequence of arguments. The typographical symbol connected to a “bullet point” is a round, black, dot. This dark dot can be perceived as a hole. This then leads to the title’s second meaning: the entry point made by the sharp tip of a bullet that pierces its target. Since Brown is discussing the deaths of several civilians killed by guns, this meaning refers to their gunshot wounds. The tragic deaths in 2013 and 2014 of young Black men like Huerta, White, Crawford, and Michael Brown, who all died after being shot by a police officer, is highlighted by the symbolic title.

One common proverbial description of dead bodies is as food for worms—an image that evokes how dead animals decompose in the wild. Brown refers to this idea of nature’s scavengers in his poem with the description of trusting “the maggots / who live beneath the floorboards / Of my house to do what they must / To any carcass” (Lines 11-14). Maggots—which are the first life stage of flies—subsist on dead flesh; their instinct to devour necrotic tissue has turned them into a symbol of revulsion—the traditional image is of swarms of maggots teeming around and inside of a “carcass” (Line 14).