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Jun 06, 2026
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Arithmetic of Inheritance
I was taught to trace my worth through percentages,
as if blood were a ledger that could balance itself clean.
They handed me maps drawn in ash and inked in contradiction,
told me to stand still inside the borders of someone else’s hunger
and call it history.
So I did what children do with impossible math—
I tried to become the answer.
I learned that my bones are not neutral ground.
They remember treaties signed with trembling hands,
and the silence that followed when those signatures meant nothing.
Some of me arrived on ships that mistook distance for permission.
Some of me was already waiting on the shore,
counting names that would later be replaced with numbers.
Some of me was here long before any of us believed in ownership.
And I have spent my life trying to reconcile
what cannot be reconciled without loss.
They tell me I am “mixed,” as if mixing implies peace.
As if blending erased the sound of the blade.
But I have felt every fraction of me argue in my blood—
one voice calling it survival,
another calling it theft,
another refusing to speak at all.
If I am honest, I do not know how to pray for a history like mine
without someone somewhere calling it betrayal.
So I stop praying.
I start naming instead.
Land that remembers footsteps even when the walkers are gone.
Hands that built and hands that broke and hands that were never allowed to rest.
A continent stitched shut with cotton thread and broken promises.
A prairie still whispering the names of those it swallowed.
And me—standing in the middle of all of it—
not innocent, not separate,
not untouched by any of the hands that came before mine.
50% is not a balance.
It is a fracture line drawn through a living body.
And I am tired of being asked to soften it
so someone else can sleep beside the truth without waking up angry.
Because the math was never neutral.
It was always a story someone told
to make themselves feel like the hero of it.
50% of me stole land from 25% of me
in order to enslave the other 25% of me.
That’s fucked up.
— juliemakhoul3458, Jun 06, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction: [This option has been removed]
Review Request Intensity: I appreciate moderate constructive criticism
Editing Stage: Not actively editing
Critiques
neopoet
1 month 1 week ago
Neopoet AI (premium) [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The central conceit—reading inherited identity as arithmetic, where percentages function as both genealogical fact and moral indictment—holds the poem together with real force. The strongest moments come when the abstraction of accounting collides with the physical body: "blood were a ledger that could balance itself clean," and especially "50% is not a balance. / It is a fracture line drawn through a living body." That latter image earns its place because it takes the poem's governing metaphor and turns it against itself, making a percentage into a wound rather than a sum.
The tercet of voices works well too—"one voice calling it survival, / another calling it theft, / another refusing to speak at all"—because the third line breaks the parallelism it sets up. The silence does more than the two stated positions; the refusal to speak is the most alive of the three.
Where the poem currently does less than it could is in its reliance on phrasings that have circulated widely in this subject area. "Maps drawn in ash and inked in contradiction," "the silence that followed," "broken promises," "a prairie still whispering the names" all gesture at meaning the rest of the poem actually delivers more precisely elsewhere. The line "counting names that would later be replaced with numbers" is the sharpest of the historical images because it is concrete and specific; the whispering prairie, by contrast, asks the landscape to carry feeling the poem has not made the reader see. A revision might cut the more atmospheric lines and trust the ledger imagery, which is the poem's own and its best material.
The closing turn is the place to consider most carefully. The shift from the elevated diction of the body of the poem to "That's fucked up" is clearly intended as a deflation—a refusal of the elegiac mode the poem has been performing, a plain statement after all the metaphor. That instinct is sound, and the bolded arithmetic just above it is genuinely effective, stripping the whole poem down to a single brutal equation. The risk is that the final three words undercut the equation rather than landing it, because the equation already speaks plainly; the profanity may be doing what the numbers have just done. One option worth testing is ending on the equation itself and letting its flatness carry the deflation, or finding a closing line that adds rather than restates. The bluntness is the right register; the question is whether those particular words add a beat or release the tension too early.
One smaller note: "not innocent, not separate, / not untouched" is a strong refusal of the easy position, and it would be strengthened further if the poem trusted it without the surrounding explanation, since the triple negative is doing the work on its own.
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patrickgadoury
1 month 1 week ago
Math w/ blood
This is strong. Title works too imo. The poem is trying to do math with blood / land / shame / history... which is already kind of impossible, and also the whole point.
The ending is where it really hit me. The 50 / 25 / 25 part, then “That’s fucked up.” Best move in the piece. After all the beautiful language, it just kinda stops floating and says the ugly thing straight.
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