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

Annaliese Jakimides

Inbetween

by Annaliese Jakimides

June 2024

Lately, I’ve been writing Instagram posts, compressions of a life, segments of exploration and time. So not a social-media girl, ever, I started in the first pandemic summer—you gone only a year-plus.

No one knows you’re my audience.

Alone. At home. Small apartment. No you. No skin or breath.

Yes, acutely aware of being grateful you didn’t live long enough to suffer and leave in times when they would have yanked us apart, stripped us from each other, not allowed me to lift you through, kissed and held and overtly loved.

I post artwork and photos that would have had, in the before times, few witnesses. Pieces made of ink and paint, used-up crimson teabags, scraps of rusted silk, pepper, toothpicks, tarpaper, canvas. Photos of shadow and cloud and fracture.

Who would have thought I’d be delighted that my work now moves the Russian historian who lives in a city of rivers, or the Spanish cellist, a fan of yours; the boy from Uganda with the kids he encourages to make art with almost nothing, the poet/farmer/gardener in South Carolina, the Philadelphia painter, that happy Filipino family of the scarved and the unscarved (I’m the only person who follows them who isn’t related; they don’t follow me).

In the narrow hospital bed, its icy rail against my back, my belly pressed into your boned body. Impossible song on my tongue. Taking you across, my breath on your beautiful skin, early sunlight on the dirty window.

I wish I’d thought to have you look at every piece of artwork I’d ever made, not just the unnamed woman of knitted copper wire standing in a corner of my living room, her burnt organza skirt collecting dust and pillowing into tufts of hand-dyed wool pooled on the polished maple floor.

Likely you would have abandoned the looking—subtle ridges, rough patches, invisible colors, a surprising cluster of nails. And so just your hands on the woman while I walked away to make breakfast.

Annaliese Jakimides has lived in cities and in the woods of northern Maine. Her prose and poetry appear in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, GQ, Utne Reader, Consequence, and the 2022 award-winning Breaking Bread. Cited in national competitions, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work has been included in audiobooks and broadcast on NPR. annaliesejakimides.com