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.

Jeanne Julian

Last Chance in 53

by Jeanne Julian

February 2022

Mississippi Girl

Alone, squatting where heron tracks mark the riverbank muck with the devil’s pitchfork, she birthed it and left it. That Sunday, when the preacher quoted Psalms—“Rescue me from the miry mud!”—she thought: maybe it’ll grow gills and a fishtail, and waggle down to New Orleans where it will learn the banjo.

Vegas Odds

She gave him $2, then went in to Excalibur. He bought water from a man. It got dark. She came out. He asked, “Now can we go to Bruxie for chicken waffle?” She said, “No silly I told you only if I win. Machines wasn’t good to mama today. Let’s get the bus.”

Final Request

Hood pulled up monk-like, he slept, hands cradling the backpack on his lap. Changed buses in Jacksonville, Philly, New York. Arrived at Boston’s South Station in the dark. At the harbor, he could barely see her ashes, fine as baby powder, sprinkling the inky water. He sneered. “See, Ma? Told you I would.”

Shade

“Road less traveled”? Ha. Try no road. He turned at a presumed hikers’ cairn—just a heap of rocks, really. Taking tiny sips of what was left in his canteen and using a saguaro, prickly old friend, to shield from Sonoran scorch… he awaited rescue. Or for spare shadow to become everlasting darkness.

Boxes

As a baby, he’d slept in a Kentucky Cardinal apple crate. Slept his way to California in a freight car. Groomed for Round Table (he won Santa Ana, ’58), sleeping in empty stalls. Slept for years in a cell after a left hook dropped Eddie. The last box will be the most comfortable.

* “Last Chance in 53” is a set of linked, 53-word stories inspired by the 53-Word Story Contest at Press 53.

Co-winner of Reed Magazine’s Edwin Markham Prize (2019), Jeanne Julian is the author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Poetry Quarterly, Minerva Rising, Snapdragon, the anthologies The Plague Papers and Lascaux Prize 2016, and elsewhere, and have won awards from Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and the North Carolina Poetry Society. She lives in South Portland, Maine. www.jeannejulian.com