My father hollered at my mother,
and raised his fist. 
Frances, find the child a karate class!
Karate would have made me
strong and unafraid: able to fend off
my tormentors with a kick—
those girls who blocked the fourth-grade classroom door,
and spat my last name on playground asphalt.
At nine, my father gave me 
his secondhand Uncle Henry,
when a band of older boys, throwing rocks,
started to follow me home after school.
He didn’t show me how to use it
and I didn’t dare take it out. 
The boys could have turned the knife on me.
There were no karate lessons,
but in time I came to know
that my father was a bully, too,
and he had been bullied, in turn.
His father used the belt
if he dared expel an asthmatic wheeze.
Bullies hate themselves, but I would have loved 
for my father to show up,
to bellow: That’s ENOUGH!
He would have made those boys disappear.