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

Deanna Benjamin

The Delicate Periphery of Your Crime

by Deanna Benjamin

December 2021

After you were indicted, the newspapers exploded. My mind
flashes the burning imprint of your face above the fold, though
more likely, you were an afterthought of a headline curled deep
into the recesses of Section A and rolled into a tube on the doorstep
of your home, the home you built with your husband of seven years,

the husband who took you from my Saturday afternoon trips with you
to Saks Fifth Avenue and the Galleria movie theater, then built me a peace
offering, an architectural drawing of my bedroom with all the furniture cut
to scale, the husband who taught me to play darts and to make sundaes
with pecans, the husband who died soon after you in orange overalls

were released from the county jail, the jail you lived in for I don’t remember
how long. Was it three years? Five? You made friends there. Friends
who made you things. One thing was a painting of purple flowers
on a silk scarf. I keep it folded now, proof in a square blue box
with a deck of cards, of tarot cards green with images of Irish folk tales

and a book to decipher meaning. When I visited you once in the jail
in downtown Houston, I wavered at the metal lockers where I put
my things. I could not take anything with me, not my purse, not my coat
or umbrella. It was winter. The weather was wet. My shoes squeaked
on the granite floor of the red stone building as I walked to a glass door.

A tower of a woman with keys lashed to her belt led me inside. The lock echoed
against the bullet-proof glass around me. ID, said another woman, a squat
woman, a serious woman, a woman without a glint in her eye or a smile
to her name. Her name tagged on her lapel. Sgt. Somebody. I slid my license
through the smooth metal opening beneath the thick glass window. The opening

was curved and green, like aged copper, preserved. The serious woman wrote
something with a ballpoint pen, blue ink in a ledger. She looked to the clock.
The second-hand moved like velvet, without a thought of interrupting time.
The serious woman documented my arrival and looked up at me without interest.
She slid my license back through the metal chamber. This way, said the other woman,

the tall woman. I followed her through a gate with metal bars the thickness
of shame, of cold, unbendable shame, to an elevator, where I met another woman,
neither pleasant nor unpleasant, who took me up to the floor where you then lived
behind locked and metal doors with a square of a window the size of a palm, maybe
two, and I saw you there, on this side of that door, this side, the side where I was except

that you were on the other side of a bulletproof window, a window that kept us from
touching, that kept us from hugging or kissing like we did on Christmas Eves, when
we all got together and sang, at midnight after we’d opened presents, Silent Night
in a circle in the middle of the asphalt street, but we couldn’t sing like that anymore,
we couldn’t kiss or hug or hold each other’s hands because of the bulletproof glass

and the smell of ammonia between us, because of the metal walls with the dial-less
phones, one on your side and one on my side, there so we could talk, so you could tell
me everything was fine, so you could tell me that you met good people there, that you
met Janie and Stacy and other women whose names I don’t remember, who, you said,
were “in” for prostitution or murder, who, you said, were good people who faced bad

situations, who, you said, were blasted nice to you, and we talked long enough for me
to tell you about the obviousness of my life, about things I don’t remember telling you,
things I don’t remember because they were obvious like salt on the rim of a tequila
margarita, or the common-placed-ness of a spider plant hanging from the ceiling
in a lime-colored macramé basket. I don’t remember anything I said that one day

when I stopped by that gray place to visit you because I only remember the sounds,
the hot, hot sound of an alarm blaring, a steady siren signaling a too-early
end to our time, because I only remember the muffled echo of the phone
as I latched it onto the hard plastic cradle and the cold sound of metal locking
into metal after I left the visiting room where you told me you were alright, where

you told me it’s all going to be ok just before we hung up the hard plastic phones
and you walked to the metal door with the tiny square window and I walked
through the metal door with a handful of other visitors, all of them seasoned, or so
I imagine, so I imagine, because I was not, I was not seasoned to some usual, every
Something Day visit to county, and because I did not recognize the casual

gait of the other visitors as they walked alongside me, in front of me, behind the
tall guard to the elevator that would take us all back to the lockers where
we put our normal life belongings, back to the squat, serious Sgt. Somebody who
penned our departure, back to our lives on this side of the bulletproof glass
that protected us from you and the fine women becoming your friends.

Deanna Benjamin’s work can be read in The Dead Mule School, Brevity, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and other reviews, and has been anthologized in Red Claw Press’s Sleep It: Writers and Artists Do Sleep. She teaches critical and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.