Poet Briana Grogan reads a poem about her mother, Klamaria, titled "Hereditary."
Hereditary
Legend says Klamaria chose to be sober. After growing up with a mother who couldn’t mother without living within walking distance of a liquor store, she refused to belly her wounds in a glass.
She was the fairest in her family, caste cold and Creole. Different daddy from her younger sister, yet never a good man around.
Had she not distanced herself from walls that peeled a mother’s muse, she may have wound up vodka-veined, sob-stumbled, and tender —tempered like I did.