Cellophane

Exhibition Date: 5 – 26 March 2026

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cellophane

I. No memory is mutual, but I pray that you’ve kept this one under my name: Stand face-to-face with a girl you’ve grown up to.

II. Allow her to ring her hands around your neck & tighten them, slowly then quickly as the light begins its outburst. As she cinches your throat closed, relax your head & allow it to tilt backward, lightgazing at the sky stitched to the dark of your eyelids.

III. Light is baited by patience: when your breath is tugged thin as fish-line, the light will lap at your feet like a tongue & then hive your head with its needles of honey & you will drink & sweet will be the pleasure of its sting.

IV. Remember what you learn from this: if light is touch, if light reveals a body by loving it, she is the same, guided always by skin, your body gone slack in her arms, how she catches you & lays you outside on the fishbone-grass so that when you wake, noosed in a bruise, you are facedown in the sky & born everywhere blue.

V. The umbrella sleeps

until it is needed, then remembered.

We know what this narrative demands: a vase broken

or saved from being broken, polaroids of a life

before this one, debts owed or repaid. Call this

animal magnetism or a multitude of longings

to undo the self with. Who can claim

to know the invisible mechanisms

unfolding over all their lives—what object

requires no gratitude but weather

that hammers down like applause.

Little harbor which does its best work

when the scene opens with the clamor

of buses through an ankle-deep flood,

rivulets sprinting heavy over the windows.

This too is the law of natural things.

What glows between the drenched

& once-drenched only looks simple,

a divinity made ordinary by practice.

All this has happened & will happen again:

someone stands on the curb, then stands over

a stranger who’s spent the last hour mourning

the faces they discarded before deciding on this shape.

& the umbrella bends its head close, patient,

over the palm reaching through lashes of rain

as a new favorite voice says, like a storm

or the promise of one coming: you exist to me

& I’m going to let you.

Poem by Khristina Alvarez

For more information, contact us via WhatsApp +34 619 701 477 or send us an email at katecontemporarymadrid@gmail.com

Kate Contemporary is located at c/ Jorge Juan 64, 28009 Madrid.