“Place as crime scene, as evidence, as escape hatch, as proof of survival.”
Danielle DeTiberus lives and teaches in Charleston, SC. Her poetry has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in Entropy, Hunger Mountain Review, and The Los Angeles Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Verse Daily, and the Best American Poetry anthology. Her manuscript Better the Girl Know Now was a finalist for Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize and Hub City’s New Southern Voices Prize
Why does this piece mean ‘homing’ to you? How does it resemble your relationship to place?
This poem is populated with the places in which I have lived: Boston, Saratoga, the Hudson Valley, Asheville, Charleston. Place holds a mythic remembering, I think, for all of us and maybe especially for storytellers. As I grow older, I think about versions of myself living in these spaces: who was she and what on earth was she thinking? She feels both familiar and far away. She also feels so precarious. A piece of her had to die so that other versions of her might live, and so I guess this poem emerged from my thinking about what a wonder it is that my deaths so far have been figurative when so much of a woman's life is confronted with violence. Living under this woolly threat of violence means to have a heightened awareness of one's surroundings at all times. Place as crime scene, as evidence, as escape hatch, as proof of survival.
Thinking of “Self Portrait,” is there a link between home and violence? Why, when writing about the artist’s journey home, did you choose to talk about how some of us never make it there?
For one, when I think of my past recklessness, my vulnerability, my ignorance, I also think of my dumb luck. No other reason why some survive and some do not. Perhaps this is why so many women are obsessed with true crime. A kind of pop culture talisman to worry that threat away. This poem is a kind of exploration of that impulse—macabre and a little appropriative, but also one rooted in real fear. This is a meditation of just some of the highlights of my life's almosts.
Here, though, I am also thinking about domestic violence and about the realities of who is most likely to harm a woman. According to a UN Women's report on femicide published in 2024, "One woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by their intimate partner or family member." And yet, I am writing from America in 2025 in which threats to women—white women in particular—are weaponized to attack trans folks, undocumented migrants, and people of color in general. The lens I have chosen to look through for this self portrait is my gender, but people are unsafe in their homes, their communities, their countries for a number of reasons.
______________________________________
Self Portrait in Which I Get Murdered
Danielle DeTiberus | Poetry, Homing
Because that Valentine’s Day, drunkenly
serpentining down Strathmore, if I had
been alone—. Because I never felt afraid
walking alongside him—a kind of armored
folly. Us two thinking we could outsmart
even ourselves. But if we never met or if
I was a little more prudent: got my first
apartment with girlfriends instead, told him
we should wait. Walked alone through the city
all those nights. If I caught the last T home.
The last pill offered up. Maybe I’d never
see it coming. Just footsteps quickening
somewhere behind me.
Or farther back
than that. Seven & living on a horse farm
in Saratoga. If I ignored my mother’s Stranger
Talk. Or maybe if she never learned to worry
anyway & remained soft to the world. So when
the car pulled over on my long walk from
bus stop to home—up the twisting
mountain, past a few houses cradled by
woods—it would have never occurred to me
to scream. I’d smile politely. A good girl always
says, Yes. I wouldn’t run, tearing through
gravel & fallen oak leaves half in decay.
I’d get in, say, Thank you. Seat belt safely
clicked in place.
Home just one
mile away. Or else I was already home: another
kind of risk. Before I met him, I wanted
to make grand mistakes in love. & besides
if we never met, I’d have surely found a few more
duds. Some dude who loved Dave Matthews,
the torture of romance. & maybe we’d cry
& fuck & drink screwdrivers—because I’d never
outgrown the sickly sweet of orange juice
mixed with booze. I wouldn’t have known
he owned a gun because we’d each have
our secrets. I’d try to be a cool girl—not
a nag. His temper meant he was passionate,
an artist maybe. Or so jealous he’d wrap
his hands around my neck. I’d claw his face
red, promising myself, This is the last
goddamned time.
& one time
it would be. Like in high school when some
boy offered to give me a ride to some party.
On the way, we pulled off the main road
to get high by the glow of the car radio.
His face gaped at me, mawkish. & if
rather than yelling he had better fucking
take me home right fucking now—open
palm raised, ready to strike his radioactive
cheek. If I told myself to calm down—.
Just paranoid, strong weed. Ignore
that creeping sense of woods & a man
closing in on a woman alone. A woman
alone: such a dangerous premise, though,
I’ve been one
most of my life.
Walking swiftly to my car after a long night
shift, wad of cash rolled into the crook
of my purse. Halfway up a craggy trail,
wondering which direction I should run
if—. A compulsion to check behind
the shower curtain before I pee, no matter
if the door is locked. My imagination is inked
with a map of each almost. Sister to Icarus
when all I want is to go home. Not wings but
the hubris of my body. How it dares to cut
a path through space. One wrong move &
watch me disappear in a crowd, in broad daylight.
A small splash beneath so many greedy suns.