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

Richard Jackson

In Its Otherness

by Richard Jackson

June 2024

Against Our Winters

The world was already here,
Serene in its otherness
—Charles Simic, “Late Arrival”

You’d have noticed the turtle in my garden first.

When the dog noses around, it hides inside its own
dome of constellations.
The Flammarion
 Engraving shows a man crawling under
the edge of the sky’s shell in an attempt
to reach eternity.
It was Aristotle who
claimed the dome of heavens above us was
a perfect geometric figure we couldn’t breach.

It’s an idea some say he borrowed from
Africa.
One night you suggested Dexter’s
 “A Night in Tunisia” from Our Man in Paris,
when everything seemed to be falling apart.

The stars are aglow in its heavens,
you would have said of our turtle.

I think it must be a supreme astronomer.

Turtles have been around since the Miocene.

Since then the stars have shifted place—
out of those galactic orchards, as you
called them, that night on Hampton Beach,

the sea losing itself in the sky at the far horizon.

Still the moon is the same moon above you
is what you’d tell us now, maybe humming it
because all words fail, as the tune goes.

Too often, we too, are exiled from our own
words, trying to crawl out from under
our own lives.
As today, a day not knowing
 it is dying, thinking to continue under its own
stars, the moon opening like a wound in the sky,
later to be swallowed by distant black holes,

though we know the truth is dark under your
eyelids, as you wrote, themselves a kind of
shell revealing eternity’s quick and aimless glance,
where, nevertheless, the stars are aglow in the heavens.

My Father’s Images

Its yellow breast splotching the dusk like a headlight in fog,
that bird, the finch, refused to leave the windowsill.
I think it knew how his brain was limping to an early death.

This morning a grosbeak called out for hours for its dead mate,

the brittle clicks rising from its red breast echoing only
themselves as if it could no longer suppose that the present
was anything but one image of the past calling another.

All he had then was his past.
These images would soon
flutter off the way his brother did in the B-17 over Belgium.

I remember another night we watched the dusk ripple
across six broken geese some boys had lined along the shore,
split down their sad sides like burst hoses of car radiators.

It was the senseless cruelty that made him shiver as if
he wanted to tell me again what his own war had cost.

Absence ate at the air like moths.

What happens
 to our words when we lose them?
Most people live
inside stories that never come true, or like him, confuse
dream and eyesight, afraid that the dream might also fail.

In those days his dreams flickered on and off like fireflies.

Faint shadows seemed to blister the walls.
He studied
his fingers as if they could grasp the past.
One cloudy
night he said the stars were buried.
I didn’t ask.

I remembered how, beside a tidal pool once, he showed me
a sea dandelion washed in, cauliflower-like, that dissolved
into shapeless rice and petals as I lifted it to hold in my hands.

Dnipro Elegy
(Ukraine)

In Dnipro, time is the drone stalking an apartment house.

Each day the clocks are rewound.
The drone’s wash
is barely a hum.
What’s left is a rumor of buried voices.
The air turns the color of those cries.
A layer of dust
serves as the only body bags.
How quickly concrete
turns to dust.
There are unspoken adjectives in what
I need to say.
The earth tilts on its axis as if to lend
an ear to what we never hear.
Who listens when we speak?
The light lies limply on the ruins.
Everything that is missing
stays missing.
Every track leaves its own emptiness.

Any elegy about this will need sutures.
Any metaphor
for this reveals its own lie.
A few parts of concrete
walls stand like grotesque memorials.

Still, a few birds
return, perched next to the sun on a barren tree limb.

Maybe it’s true, as the philosophers say, what is outside us
comes from what is inside
as if our words could send out
new beginnings
the way mushrooms create their own
breeze to dispense their pores
or the way stardust drifts
through space to form new lives,
but in the end, maybe
the hope is that, as Miles Davis said, don’t play
what’s there, play what’s not there,
desperately hoping
for that last pocket of air left in the wordless rubble.

Richard Jackson has authored 18 poetry books and 12 editions; anthologies; and books of essays, interviews, and translations. He has edited 30 chapbooks by eastern European poets and was awarded the Order of Freedom by Slovenia’s president for literary and humanitarian work during the Balkan wars. He has won Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH, and Witter Bynner Fellowships. His poems have been translated into 17 languages.