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.

DB Jonas

Odradek

by DB Jonas

January 2023

Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind
of activity, which has worn out; this does not apply to Odradek.
—Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a Family Man”

Crown prince of excess, emperor of loose-ends,
his irregular, clattering step is always just barely
audible in the stillness. It is always near. I myself
have acquired its scrabbling rhythm over a full
forty years now, from the darkness of the corridor,
from the gravitational creak of this old house
settling into itself, from the narrow staircases of sleep.
I have even thought I’d seen him once or twice,
pausing to catch his breath, an oddment of sticks
among the centipedes and tangled sweepings.

And how would you know him, you ask, if you chanced
upon him on the stair? Well, we have it on good authority
that it would be the sound his voice makes, a kind
of rustling, the rustling of dry leaves, which is, I might add,
the noise a poem makes, like the melody of idle chit-chat,
and by the gracious, rasping, rallentando of his sentences.

His domain, when all is said and done, is after all
the domain of poems, where the sounds of words call
to one another across impossible distances, and where
you may, as if in the twilight, hear the rumor of thought
scratching its fleas. His is the empire of an unconquerable
fatigue, advancing, advancing across an endless terrain,
gaining indiscernible progress toward some distant,
shining purpose, an urgent purpose long ago forgotten.

DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Neologism, Consilience Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry, The Decadent Review, Revue {R}évolution, and others. His first collection, Tarantula Season, will be released by Finishing Line Press in 2023.