so_soft_as_this raze on the last day of her life she answers to a name that's not her own when you call her at work while studying the black base of every vacant seat in the back of a rented hall. you ask what you can do to make things better. nothing, she says. the hushed violence of her despair leaves you with a split lip and the tang of your own tar on your tongue. in her room is a gift she's left for you to find after she sets fire to the map of her life: a heart no bigger than a breath, carved from balsa wood. its painted face perfect but for the jagged jaw and chapped cheeks. you stained the thin skin of doomed trees like these when you were young and made compact keepsakes of your own, though none were so soft as this. 251027 what's it to you? who go blather from