Aalok Thakkar: Poetry

On the Compositional Inverse of the Square-Root Function

I open my grandmother's cookbook,
And follow her instructions,
Measure by measure.

I peel the papery skins
Of the onions for my soup,
Counting each layer I remove.

My knife divides them—
Halving, quartering, cutting to eighths—
And the air stings my eyes.

The pieces gather in the pot,
Where butter melts slowly,
Golden and patient,
Just as she wrote.

But somewhere among
The chopping and the simmering,
Somewhere among
The counting and the dividing,
Somehow, by mistake,
I take
The square root of an onion.

On the counter rests
A strange remnant,
Pungent in its incompleteness:
Less than a whole,
Yet more than nothing—
A something without a name.

I wonder
If another square-rooted onion,
Multiplied by this one,
Would bring back the whole
She would've put into the soup.

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