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.

Kelly Vance

Open Casket, 2020 (flesh, memory, unhinged in wood)

by Kelly Vance

May 2023

This is a body,
an empty parking space nothing shiny ever filled,

a grassland with shadows whispering along its paths,
a coded message too long to decipher in a single lifetime.

My mouth remembers the trails along each impermanent
bicep, but hunger is a waiting game,

plays chicken with death.
We were Janus eyeing a double-edged sword;

two faces running along two opposite paths—
Who are we when we are at our most impermanent?

In your arms, I am a whisper of life; time,
like the smell of jasmine, is so impermanent

you can’t place it—and in this tender game,
I am the struggle and the defeat. I am nothing.

I fall into you like the time I drank too much, was felled
into your tub through a flimsy shower curtain.

I sank my teeth into your arm, made a path
as we wrestled from the bed to the floor,

you laughed like I was crazy. I was impermanent
and crazy, and fully absorbed in our ridiculous game.

I’ll never forget looking up at you from the deep nothing,
both of us laughing—inexplicably lost and fulfilled.

Now, as your memorial live-streams into my office, I am filled
with the conflict of everything we never said, the paths

neither of us chose, the half-remembered lifetimes
of tacit apologies and entirely impermanent

enmities we boxed away, playing anger like a child’s game.
And I won’t say it’s better to believe the dead regret nothing.

Kelly Vance is a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University’s MFA program in creative writing where she received the Emerging Writers Award for poetry in 2021. In 2019, she completed the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy affiliated with Women Writing for (a) Change, Cincinnati, and incorporates many conscious leadership concepts into her writing, mentorship, and professional work as a psychiatrist.