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.

Anna Citrino

Remembering Adella

by Anna Citrino

April 2023

We are people of the grasslands.
Except for being six feet tall, my mother
was ordinary as grama grass, buffalo grass—

low to the ground and rarely noticed. Without grass,
soil flies loose, wind carries away what sustains life.
Like the grass here in Wyoming, bowed by wind,

my mother rooted her life on the plains,
her straight back inclining to its needs.
Every action a prayer of submission to necessary work:

my mother bent over a stove stirring a pot, bent over
newborn sisters and brothers, bent over a pail, milking sheep;
her tall frame pacing slowly between sheets

as she hung them on a line to dry. Her body present,
then disappearing between the sheets’ stretched lengths,
light breathed through sun’s long curve into cloth’s

warp and weft, fabric swelling and flapping in wind’s funnel.
Her body visible, going about work, then invisible.
The strength it took to bend and lift their wet weight.

Now I bend
over her on her deathbed, on this day full of wind,
as she lies between sheets she washed so often.

I see her body’s weft
giving itself breath by breath to the light,
evaporating from her, lifting its weight.

Her efforts, like the effort of ten thousand blades
of ordinary grass—all us ordinary, commonplace people,
and the labor we give ourselves to, that holds together

the soil of life. I see what you did, Mother. I remember.

Anna Citrino taught abroad in six countries. Her work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Canary, Evening Street Review, Indelible, and Paterson Literary Review, among other journals. She is the author of two books, A Space Between (Bordighera Press) and Buoyant (Bellowing Ark Press), and two chapbooks, Saudade and To Find a River. She lives in Sonoma County. Read more of her writing at annacitrino.com.