Dear Readers,

When we launched Waterwheel Review, we were keen to explain why we were so moved and motivated by the image of the waterwheel. Water stands for language, an ever flowing, renewable source; the waterwheel, an engine of labor, circles through, lifting words and then dropping them back into the running stream. Our magazine is a mill, we said, where the waterwheel powers writing and publishing. “We want—and need—to make things.”

For a couple of years, now, we have known that we can’t make enough of our own things while we give so much energy to the work of others. We have had to cut substantially the time and attention devoted to our own writing, and mostly we have been glad to do it, determined to find a way to repay our own work in the end. We never did find that way.

If we could quit our jobs and earn that income publishing this magazine, we would take that deal in an instant. But that’s not the world we live in. For many, many months we have known this, but we couldn’t accept it until now. And thank goodness for that.

Every single issue of this magazine has been a wonder that transported and enchanted us. We can’t say we gloried in every moment. We read or edited or built the site at times while sick, exhausted, grieving—that’s the nature of any publication. But we damn well gloried in every word, every paired image and sound.

Four years and thirty-six issues: What an honor to publish our contributors. What a privilege to offer stunning work to our readers. We must use the word pleasure, too, always rolled out to accompany “honor and privilege,” but pleasure isn’t strong enough, nor is gratitude nor joy nor blessing. For once we find ourselves at a loss for words to express precisely what it has meant to keep this waterwheel turning.

Maybe this will do it: How many times does anyone ever fully achieve the glittering, half-glimpsed vision floating above; that winking, flirting piece of art we ache to manifest? For the three of us, precisely this once.

We will keep making things and so will you. We started this magazine with the image of the waterwheel and a Jean Rhys quote, and we will end in the same way, as we thank you for reading and submitting, and wish you and yours all the very best:

Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl

September 1, 2024: Waterwheel Review will stay online for the foreseeable future. It remains as it looked for the final June 2024 issue.

Nate Maxson

Winter Solstice 2021

by Nate Maxson

March 2022

after Frederick Seidel

A painting of a White Russian general on a horse, wounded and leading his cloaked and shivering troops on a march over the Siberian ice in a column behind him
It sat on a wall in the art gallery where I worked for a summer, no one bought it but sometimes a potential customer would stop and stare for a moment before moving on to the more palatable sunsets and western landscapes

One considers, such things in time
Like nursery rhymes

I like bathing when it’s raining, on Christmas Eve
With a German novel to read before the water cools

Remember how it used to snow
Every year
Like clockwork
I want to live
Inside
The moment
I want to disappear
Into the fog that recedes upon approach,
To swallow my vanishing
Like a coin, a coded message
I can’t let them find me
Late to my own séance again
All the days in retreat
Northwards, the birth of another man’s child or god
We’ll split the difference

I like bathing when it’s raining
In the summer
I like dreaming
In the water

I am a plane that disappeared over the ocean
Schrodinger’s private jet
Either it crashed or it transcended
Why not both

I want to disappear
I want to live
Why not both
Deja vu or quantum entanglement
My long retreat across the empty places where it used to snow
All the days
In escape
Inside the storm
Where it’s warmest

When I was small enough, young enough
To fit my whole body in the bathtub
I would hold my head
Underwater
For a minute
I didn’t know
These are the quiet hours
Dawnlight
Twilight
Before the war
Returns
This will not save the world
When the plane you’re on
Experiences turbulence
Don’t you think about it
Someday
I’ll be a field of yellow scrub grass
The boot prints of men who fled across me
Already flattening out
Fading with the daylight

Nate Maxson is a writer, performance artist, and the author of several collections of poetry. His latest, Maps to the Vanishing, is out fall 2022 from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.