At the Museum of Trades and Traditions

Here is the tool with the delicate
handle designed to turn a tree trunk

into a pipe for channeling water. And here
is the tortoise shell carved into combs

a paisley gold. Here are the tin stamps
once pressed into warm butter to raise

the outline of a milkmaid or sunrise
on its hardening surface. Here the tobacco horns,

here the looms, here the little knives
and the elegant silver-plated pistols. We say,

Which job would you have picked?
Butter churner or glassblower? Blacksmith

or weaver? Though, as women, we wouldn’t
have had so many options. Unlike my daughters,

whose father I chose from a list of hair
and eye color, narrowing the field by height

and weight and college major. Someday I’ll find
that tool in a museum, the squat centrifuge,

the gasping seal of its lid, the gentle click
and whir as it swirled the sperm into a thin serum.

Or perhaps the slight catheter designed
to angle past the cervix and into the ether

of my womb. There, on velvet, under a soft light
in some airless case, the tools that made me a mother.

Keetje Kuipers, “At the Museum of Trades and Traditions” from All Its Charms. Copyright © 2019 by Keetje Kuipers. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.