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810 Abigail Gramig “Chuck Autumn” If Abigail Gramig is any indication, the new generation of Kentucky poets is ready to assert itself. Still in her early twenties and a recent graduate of Bellarmine University , she has already demonstrated remarkable maturity and originality in her first collection of poems, Dusting the Piano (2004). She is a protean poet with a unique voice and many faces and disguises. In her youthful poems she has created an enchanted garden of delights and insights written in compact free verse. In this new poem she assumes the disguise of a college professor who sees and understands why her nursing students are smoking cancer-causing cigarettes outside her office window between classes. h The start of school. Outside my office window nursing students gather. A flock of blue-swathed smokers. Girls mostly, all cigarettes and scrubs. I don’t begrudge them their relief the white paper hanging from lower lips. Or poised between middle and forefinger, the ash end growing longer and eventually falling under the thick tread of their sneakers. My grandmother used to smoke. For so many years she filled those hurried hands, fingers with tense nicotine. All this until she got cancer and I watched her hair and weight fall away. It didn’t take very long. It is hard work, learning to take care of people. So I give them permission, more so than to the deep, ever-brooding The author’s name 811 English students I’m used to. After all, nurses know the eventual effect of their stress relief, the piecemeal decline that will surely come after a while. They drop what’s left of their cigarette breaks into a sand-filled cement planter and disappear into the doors of my building, back to class. I watch one, a pediatric nurse in Charlie Brown scrubs— he and Lucy frozen in that hopeful moment just before she yanks the football away and Chuck goes flying. Abigail Gramig 811 ...

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