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BETH ANN FENNELLY
Favors
People look at my baby and wonder whom she favors.
Because she doesn’t look like me, they decide she looks like her
father. I nod. I nod and nod. But really she favors the great dead one.
My own bad Dad. She favors him, the same brown eyes, the same scooped
out philtrum, that valley leading from nose to mouth, as if the warm
fingers which formed her stroked a perfect pinkie tip there to sculpt
it, a valley filled with orchards where dusk brings cinnamon-velvet deer
who crunch sweet apples fallen beneath the bee-buzzing, white-blooming
trees. See, I love her, so even from the grave he spites me. Look at
him, winning again, crying in the bassinet. Here I come on quick feet
unbuttoning my blouse. 
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