How she loved gathering
tadpoles from the rivulet
in the park, and how she
took them home and
placed them in pond water
with stones on the bottom
of the aquarium, and how
she wanted them to live
in that muddy slough,
and how they didn’t.

Karen Loeb’s poems appeared recently in Puerto del Sol, Foreign Literary Journal, and Muddy River Poetry Review. Her work has won the fiction and poetry contests in Wisconsin People and Ideas. She was a recent Eau Claire, Wisconsin writer-in-residence, and she’s a participant in the annual Cascadia Poetry Postcard Festival.