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.

Jason Ranek

Triptych for the Dead

by Jason Ranek

December 2023

Here lies the old man bent
to the work of dying in a bed
not his own, his toothless mouth
collapsing into the terminal
mask of his face. His scalp
shining like bone china.
His eyes dimmed and rolling back
into a brain woolly with static.
His words smearing to
a moan of every meaning—
a cry from the edge of
the precipice, a postcard from
a glimpse into the void. His
toenails clinging like barnacles.
His body the weight of a shrivelled
mushroom, sheer as mist from
my tea. His sleep a night sky
bright with constellations.

***

Witness the wind. Light and
shadow of passing clouds.
The smell of rain. The flesh of
summer ripening like
a strawberry. Goldenrod and
lupins. The soil giving and
the soil taking. The soil opening
like a mother’s embrace. Time
turning our horoscopes into
obituaries. Seeing the pine—
not the mind’s projection of
a pine—each twig and needle
a paean to reality—not
the mind’s simulacrum of reality.
Twilight like amnesia in which
I meet the world again for the
first time. . . Like a wild currant,
its little nova on my tongue.

***

Where do the dead go in
our spirals of troubled sleep, in
the fortified trenches of our
dreams? We, who are their pale
emissaries, carry now their
boots like vacant totems
to emptiness, their gloves like
the shed skins of the wind.
In those translucent days,
when the boundary between
the worlds was thin, their
hands bruised like peaches.
Daylight came, but their eyes
hardened like globes of colored
glass. Finally, their breath was
drawn out like a fiber, and
there, in the twisting dark, their
slack faces grew young again.

—Jozsef Arpas, 1932 – 2023

Jason Ranek, originally from the Midwest USA, lives in Norway with his wife and three children. Over the last twenty years, his work has appeared in Rattle, Oasis, and The Briar Cliff Review, among others. His most recent collection, The Crossing, was published by Lone Willow Press in 2011.