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.