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

Caroline Canter Triscik

Sometimes I Do Not Know If I Should Tell My Children What I Have Seen

by Caroline Canter Triscik

February 2024

I am out for a run at 10:24 a.m., the rhythm
of my sneakers on these suburban sidewalks
like a metronome waiting
for the music’s accompaniment—
picking up my pace when passing
the landscape companies who mow and trim
and manicure alongside. I learned very young
not to trust a man who leers too long.

An unexpected hawk swoops
out and up through the maple’s turning
leaves, the gray tail of a squirrel dangling
from its talons.
I gasp, audible to only me, yet keep
running. Not once, but twice
on this auspicious 15-minute run-walk-
run-walk do I witness this—what feels
like violence—the latter act
preceded by a cry that I had thought
the cry of our neighbor’s cat accidentally
left outside their front porch door. Now
I imagine it the cry of the mother anticipating
the emptiness of her nest.

The circle of life, I say when I recount
the story to my sons, the elder responding,
More like the circle of death. We are raising
peacemakers who stood on our state capitol’s
steps at 10 & 8, poster-board & Crayola marker
signs in hand that read in child-script: Our lives
are worth more than a gun and No Guns Okay
with a drawing resembling a pistol with a circle
surrounding and diagonal line across the middle.

Not Steve and Marshmallow, the younger
son says now, assuring himself of the livelihood
of these two neighborhood squirrels he named
when we moved to this suburban dream
six years ago. Turns out we do have
a neighbor named Steve, though no one
in this cul-de-sac, that we’re aware
of, goes by Marshmallow. I have a daughter
to whom I do not tell this story tonight she
is dancing, though will come home soon.

I vow to look up the life expectancy
of a squirrel, hoping these lives cut
short on this morning’s run were
not that abbreviated. And yet still
if I sit long enough in the silence,
remember the imagery, the cry, the horror
I felt returns, the tingling in my legs as I ran
through the cold autumn air, not letting
numbness begin again.

Caroline Canter Triscik is a poet, Licensed Professional Counselor, and Midwesterner transplanted to the East coast. She holds a B.A. in English from Purdue University and an M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Messiah University. In her work as a writer and as a therapist, she believes that healing is found in connection with one another through words and presence.