Will Power Edward Aubanel Page

Will smiled. “Because someone had to will her back into the world. And I had the right name for it.”

He published Sabine’s poems under a small press he founded called No Witness Press . The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will. One found its way to a poet in Montreal, who read it on public radio. Then a scholar in Lyon. Then a filmmaker. Will Power Edward Aubanel

That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library. He began to translate the journal by flashlight. Sabine’s poems weren’t minor at all. They were devastating—about a woman who built a garden in a prison yard, who taught illiterate factory girls to read using smuggled newspapers, who loved another woman and wrote about it as if the sky were a held breath. Will smiled

Will Power Edward Aubanel had always hated his name. It was a cruel joke his late father, a classics professor with a flair for the absurd, had left him. “Will Power” as a first name, “Edward” as a fig leaf of normalcy, and “Aubanel” as the surname that guaranteed no one would forget the punchline. The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will

He went home, brewed tea, and started on the next box—a shoemaker’s diary from 1888, filled with pressed flowers and the names of lost children.