Toaster Knife (ROUND 3)

Let's workshop this poem that explores themes of sexual tension and power dynamics between a man—protector, yet predator—and a young girl—innocent, yet libidinous—in a hotel breakfast setting

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Toaster Knife

. . . . If you / had girls like your canals, / oh Venice, cunts / like little alleyways, you’d be / the greatest city in the world.—Goethe (Venetian Epigrams)

The hotel toaster popped. Her continental muffin,
the smaller half, lacked diameter to rise from the slit—
too tight anyway to be fingered out unhurt. Fourteen
(no more), she blushed in making a grown man wait
behind her with his girthy bagel (doubtful of its fit).
She poised her knife. Instinct had me grab her wrist. 
“No, Sweetie. You’ll get zapped.” Teen-tartar teeth
glistened nymphette flirtation, as at the pool where
in noticing me she noticed not the string dangling
from the shifted triangle of that cherry one piece.

She handed over the knife as if in tacit submission
to me taking the lead. “Get it when it pops,” I said—
and, stern, drove the lever up. My stiff momentum,
libidinous, shot her little slice out beyond halfway.
Yet her gaze, boring into me—clear in my periphery
despite eyes fixed on the toaster—had her delayed.
“We gotta work together,” I said. “It’s like dancing.”
“Okay,” she said, hooking errant hair around her ear.
“You even know how?” I asked closer into that ear.
“Yes,” she smiled. “With someone else, I mean.”

Into her shampoo heat I moved before response—
to focus us, and since it had been a stretch for me. 
At my left she caved into me, shifting her weight
onto her right leg, hip bony in my fullness. “Daddy,”
my son called from our table. A caned man tapped
to our right. Even so, I teased her with finger flicks
too feathery to send the muffin forth. “Okay, okay.
We’ll get it this time,” I promised. But still my flicks
baited with delicacy. “Harder,” she sighed—bodies
merging. Lower, yet fierce, she whispered: “Harder.”

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