02 Feb Disappointment Apples by Geoffrey Gatza
Like a blood-orange sun setting on a cold day.
In French, apples are apples. Pommes.
In French, potatoes are earth-apples. Pommes de terre.
I worked as a chef for forty years.
In that time, I hoped to create a portable
Dessert of crisp, French-fried apples.
Set in golden matchsticks, like gleaming
Red-boxed McDonald’s French fries.
Seductive warm apples, slightly sweet,
Somewhat sour, green and red apples.
Crisp like French fries are crisp,
Tender apple inside, like tarte tatin.
Cinnamon sugared. Waiting in rows
Under the sun-like lights of heat-lamps.
In Cooking, apples are pommes.
In Cooking, potatoes are pommes.
Under the unity of naming
I hoped to bridge that gap, but
The hungry spirit of time
looks truth in the eyes.
No amount of experiment,
experience, and discovery
can change my disappointment
Apples are not potatoes,
And burn in hot oil.
About the Poet
Geoffrey Gatza is the author of the poetry collections The House of Forgetting (2012), Apollo: A Conceptual Poem (2014), and A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees (2018). This poem appears in his new collection Self Geofferential (2025) published by BlazeVOX [books].
Gatza’s poems have been published in anthologies, as well as magazines and journals including Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, The Pickled Body, Peach Mag, Tupelo Quarterly and various others. His play on Marcel Duchamp was staged in an art installation in Philadelphia and performed in New York City.
Gatza is an award-winning editor, publisher and poet. He is the driving force behind BlazeVOX, a small press located in Buffalo, NY. He lives in Kenmore, NY.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.