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.

Waterwheel Review

Literature Without Labels

John Bradley

What You Should Know (The Nile)

by John Bradley

December 2022

1.
The Nile, as seen from above, weighs 12.80 sidereal ounces. 1,280 tons of cricket parts.
128.0159 billion silted vowels. Laden with insoluble sleep.

2.
That watch at the bottom of the glass of water that gives the exact moment an axe blossoms in
the Nile. So that a piano tuner plays underwater. Feather and nether. An undertaker bee from
before the unraveling. That speck of an ant that calls forth a bird that sings of a spore that will be
found in your next syllable.

3.
Photo: The Nile as someone’s curiously flavorless forearm. Photo: The Nile seeping from holes
in your fedora. Photo: The Nile sleeping in your mother’s mother’s nightgown. Photo: A herd
of inflatable poets sipping from the Nile.

4.
What you should know: A voice with no roots pushing out. I place my hand over the hole and
hold my breath. Then I hear the voice coming out of a bough just behind. The voice holds on to
one word, one sound, and keeps prolonging it, past what’s discernible. It’s either moonrobe or
moonwarble. Moonventricle or maybe moonverde. Oh, I stood under the bough until the voice
came out of my foot. My ankle, my leg. I turned around. The voice, as it passed, did not
recognize me.

5.
Any fool can find ten hungry flies, she tells me, picking at her salad. Someone, dear mouth, must
be told. That fleeing substance called oracular leakage.

6.
The composer stated, I was dissecting a crow’s throat at the time. Moonsoaked or moonbloat.
The plumber whistled, tingling the air, which slipped far down the dim drain. Moonspittle or
moonstippled. No one remembered to measure said defendant’s right arm. For so many solar
sleeve miles.

7.
The Nile weighs 12.80 pulsations per millisecond. 12.80 tons of cricket halleluiahs. 12.80
humming hummingbird parsecs. The Nile tickling your aorta as you hear this. Making sure you
breathe in and through. Whatever it is that sleep cannot dissolve.

John Bradley has published in Calibanonline, DMQ Review, Hotel Amerika, Lake Effect, Otoliths, SurVision, and elsewhere. His Hotel Montparnasse: Letters to Cesar Vallejo (Dos Madres Press) is a verse novel about the Peruvian poet, apparently confined to a hotel near his grave. John’s collection Dear Morpheus, The Glue That Is You is due 2023 from Dos Madres. He’s the poetry editor of Cider Press Review.