It won’t be a bullet

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Line Break

A line break can be used to create a double meaning in a sentence or to emphasize one part of a sentence over the other. In “it won’t be a bullet,” Smith uses line breaks several times to impart double meanings.

The speaker says, “find me / buried between the pages” (Lines 4-5). This break puts the emphasis on the first part of the sentence, the speaker telling the reader to “find [them]” (Line 4). It suggests at first that the speaker wants the reader to know who they are as a living person. The full sentence, however, changes the meaning from a command to a revelation that the speaker will already be dead, and it will be too late to know who they really are or were in life. Mortality is fleeting and death can come quickly, cutting off our possibility of knowing one another for who we really are. The lines also suggest that history routinely buries Smith and those like them. To really see them, one must “find” (Line 4) them not on the surface of the page, which is what one can easily see or read, but “between” (Line 5) the pages, in the so-called fringes or spaces that don’t get much attention. This line break also creates intimacy between speaker and reader. To find the speaker, one must theoretically go to the very place in which they lie buried. The reader, then, will be on the same level as Smith through the act of finding, will exist in the same “buried” (Line 5) space as the speaker.

Likewise, in the following line break, “family, / gathered around my barely body telling me to go / toward myself” (Lines 9-11), Smith puts the emphasis on the sentence fragment “telling me to go” (Line 10). The speaker is departing from their family, never to return. It allows the thought of “going” to linger for a moment at the line break to suggest that the speaker will go not just away from family but toward something else, namely themselves.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is a device in which the author puts two things next to one another in order to invite comparison. Throughout “it won’t be a bullet,” Smith juxtaposes different kinds of deaths. The one kind of death, from a bullet, is placed against a type of death can be nonviolent. Another strong example of juxtaposition comes when Smith writes, “i’m not the kind of black man who dies on the news. / i’m the kind who grows thinner & thinner & thinner” (Lines 7-8). Placing these two different “kind[s] of black man” (Line 7) next to one another shows that they are similar in the sense that both kinds are often labeled and stereotyped by their typical ways of dying. Both are somewhat dehumanized, yet they are dehumanized in different ways. The kind of Black man who doesn’t die on the news is often ignored by a society that would ignore the health crisis threatening the lives of Black gay men.

Non-capitalization

In an interview with Booth Magazine, Smith says that they choose not to capitalize letters in their poetry because they prefer the way un-capitalized letters look. They also note that a fellow poet, Nate Marshall, remarked that the lower-case “i” looks like a little Black boy, which Smith found endearing. The choice not to capitalize letters informs who this poem is for and what it is about. In Smith’s own words, it “brings it all down to the same level” and fills the poem with little Black boys. It draws a contrast to the more formal world governed by authority figures who seek to elevate some words, some letters, and some people to a higher position over others. Smith’s choice not to capitalize the “I” and the beginning letter of each sentence is again an expression of an identity that seeks to be free in spite of social rules and idioms, an identity that creates in defiance of those expectations and norms.

Form and Meter

“it won’t be a bullet” consists of three stanzas, presenting the archetypal narrative structure: beginning, middle, and end (though the title—“it won’t be a bullet”—is also the tacit first line of the poem and, thus, perhaps the tacit first stanza).

However, while this stanzaic balance gives the poem a core formal logic, the poem is also written in free verse, meaning that it has no consistent metrical or rhyme pattern. Typically, therefore, free-verse poems lack a melodic character, and this is partly true for Danez’s poem. Indeed, the aural quality is at times almost discordant; not only is there no predictable rise and fall of metrical emphasis, but the poem presents several series of unintuitive, consecutive syllabic stresses. Consider Line 2 (the bolded syllables denote stress/emphasis): “thank god. i can go quietly […]” The first four words, each constituted by a lone stressed syllable, come in with a stark force—only to meet a kind of disintegration through the disjointed and predominantly unstressed non-rhythm of “go quietly” (Line 2). The poem’s pervasively splintered metrical quality coheres with the speaker’s sense of inner fragmentation; they are dissociated from themselves, pulled between two marginalized identities and ruminating on two respective, marginalizing deaths. Nevertheless, the poem retains some musicality though such literary devices as consonance—the repetition of like sounds in close proximity. One form of consonance, alliteration, appears in the same line: “thank god. I can go quietly. the doctor will explain death” (Line 2).