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.

Elana Wolff

Bloom

by Elana Wolff

October 2022

I spend entire walks gazing at greens. I have this vague sensation that I lived in them long ago—
the way a sentence, as Emerson said, was once an animal. What did he mean? Fish, lizard, bird,
beast? Motley? Multicolored? Sassgoní—in Hebrew. A word I’ve always loved. Because it’s
spring, the blooming is resplendent; scents that take your breath. Mock orange, the strongest,
reminds me of the poem by Glück.

I raise my gaze to the tiger’s claw—the Indian coral tree, a parrot with its beak in a
brilliant bloom. So focused in that heady red, it doesn’t notice this woman below, her beckoning
falsetto. True life is beyond song, she hears herself pipe up, craning a tenuous neck. Then sits on
a bench to rest, thinks of her mother, oceans away, the story of the gull that crashed—into a
power transformer, causing a bang that rocked the block. How does a gull lose track like that?

I never grow weary of gazing at trees. The cypresses across the street, the fig and honey
locust, the neem. Imaginary scent of fennel, ataraxic as grass. The breeze is playing ball with the
dust, a tumbleweed-like motion. My spot on the bench is altered by this, though I remain where I
was. Probably I won’t go home without some gift of nature docked in my pocket—a rock, a pod,
a strip of bark. If only to let them go. We’re all just passing through here, on our circuits, exchanging traces.

Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada, on the traditional lands of Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee First Nations. Her writing has most recently appeared (or will appear) in Bear Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, Grain, Montréal Serai, Sepia, Taddle Creek Magazine, The Maynard, Verse-Virtual, and White Wall Review. Her newest poetry collection is Shape Taking (Ekstasis Editions, 2021).