In this moment before birth,
I am turning,
a tiny mass of flesh/bones
struggling toward the light,
my slippery cord
    unra  v   e    l     i      n       g   ,
my head a mess of milk white fuzz
that pushes down and through,
my wrinkled eyes sealed,
arms  fingers  legs
rubbery  red  wet.

My mother's family waits outside,
a Greek chorus drinking black coffee,
relieved that the labor is over.

Someone marks the time:
one-twenty-three-a-m,
and my father, half-drunk,
plays the guitar in a nightclub
somewhere in South Philly.
He does not even know,
as his callous young fingers
interpret "Stardust,"
that his first son
has been born.

Someone gives him the news,
buys him a drink,
while my mother,
beautiful  serene  sedated,
smiling like Rita Hayworth
in a pinup picture,
cradles me with  nervous sighs.

She is tended now
by hospital people
who daydream about loved ones,
fearful and faraway,
points on a fiery map.

But I am just another baby
in an era when babies
are mass produced
like munitions.

I was conceived sometime
in the dawn of a new year,
the result of two militant lovers
    making up
while the rest of the world
lusted for the blood of boys
born twenty years before...
a war baby
who brings no peace.