‘Mercy’ by Stephanie Alvarez
Written by Epi Arriagada. Photography and Narration by Stephanie Alvarez. Visuals by Epi Arriagada
Artist Feature: Stephanie Alvarez
Stephanie Alvarez is a poet whose work dwells in the borderlands of grief, transformation, and desire. Her writing does not shy away from darkness—instead, it inhabits it fully, letting readers witness how pain splinters and reshapes the soul. What sets her apart is the way she threads resilience through despair, allowing even the heaviest words to carry a strange and haunting beauty.
Her poetry feels like a mirror to the body’s inner weather: frozen stillness, sudden fire, and finally, the soft possibility of awakening. Each piece offers a visceral reminder that brokenness does not end the story—it becomes the very material from which new worlds are formed.
Image credit: Stephanie Alvarez
Mercy
Only, lonely, lovely,
Hello.
Once upon a time became
30 below.
Hearts touched by Death’s cool kiss
Lay quietly still in
Hypnotically cruel bliss.
A deliberately coy trist
And a motion of the wrist,
All breaks down to this -
Loving, Unloving, Fateful,
Unfaithful, Missed.
Miscommunication plus
Misinterpretation
Equal grief stricken
Heartache times three.
Then comes the thaw.
Tiny winding splinters through veins
Inescapable pain
Inexplicably remains.
Climbing high and dropping low.
Rapidly, fire builds in the depths and rages,
Races,
Screaming towards the top.
Towards light and open air
And once it is there
It meets a flame.
No name, no hope.
No pain that any ear can hear.
Only lonely and lovely.
Hold me.
Hello, sweet Mercy.
Mercy is a portrait of heartbreak in motion, unfolding through images of freeze, fracture, fire, and fragile surrender. Alvarez begins with repetition—“Only, lonely, lovely”—a chant that frames the entire poem. These three words don’t just describe emotion; they create a rhythm, a pulse of contradiction where isolation and beauty exist in the same breath.
The first half of the poem carries the weight of disconnection. Relationships collapse into miscommunication and misinterpretation, and love is reduced to arithmetic: “Equal grief stricken / Heartache times three.” Her use of numbers to measure pain shows how heartbreak defies language—reduced to cold calculation when words themselves fail.
Then the thaw comes, and the poem changes shape. Pain is no longer silent; it moves like splinters in the veins, building into a fire that cannot be contained. Alvarez captures the body of grief—how it climbs, drops, rages, and races toward release. This physicality is what makes the poem visceral: it doesn’t describe pain from afar, it inhabits it.
Yet even the eruption offers no easy resolution. The flame that greets the reader at the peak is nameless, hopeless, and unheard. It is both climax and void, the raw space where suffering becomes too vast for expression.
Still, the closing refrain circles back: “Only lonely and lovely. / Hold me. / Hello, sweet Mercy.” The poem does not offer resolution in the traditional sense, but what it does offer is invocation. Mercy becomes the whispered presence that grief calls to—not the erasure of pain, but the grace to live with it.
Visual Interpretation
The video extends this cycle without explaining it: stillness in nature, the body at rest, a hand at the cold window, fire breaking through, and an awakening into a dreamlike world. These images move with the poem rather than define it, creating another way of entering its rhythm—quiet, eruptive, and searching.
