In Fall 2024, Lisa Kerr completed a two-week residency as the Gibbes Museum of Art’s first poet-in-residence. She invited a handful of local poets to join her at the concluding poetry reading and collected their works into a keepsake chapbook, along with several of the poems she wrote during residency. While Kerr’s main focus was responding to paintings in the Reynier Llanes’ exhibition Passages, Fluorescence is a poem she wrote about one of the pieces in the Gibbes permanent collection.
Fluorescence
“Black light is a stream of invisible energy that causes different materials to react in their own way. Sometimes the energy is absorbed and released in colored light called flourescence.”
--Excerpted from “The Secret Lives of Paintings” exhibit at Gibbes Museum of Art that inspired this poem
When I hide, it is in fear of fluorescence. That
you, like a black light, will illuminate me.
Don’t tell me we are more beautiful where we are broken.
Don’t mention the tradition of painting fault lines gold.
I wanted you always to see me the way you did the day
you asked, Maybe this? I was told everything I wanted
was on the other side of don’t go, and I went.
Maybe we all want to be absorbed, whole, at least one time.
I think that is accurate.
But shut the light when you are done, love.
Let the world think less of me.