Birthday

Epidurals fail
Cipher the circumference
of his head.
The answer is worrisome.
Anointed into the unimaginable
emergence of life through vagina.
A graphitic history
left behind on fleshy 
walls with tags painted 
inside. Seen a corpse 
when breath is briefly gone?
What of a son, a daughter
in that shadowed instance 
before breath has come along?
A fish flopped from water—
blue screaming into pink—
and legend and myth,
a child, a child.

appeared in the spring 2008 issue of the Cafe Review

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