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On Hearing the News
by Earl Coleman

When the test came back negative, at first he thought
what flimsy universe is this that has no tolling bell
announcing tragedy, no drumroll when you’re spared
inglorious defeat, but then he felt he needed to do
something grand, quit work, go everywhere at once,
including places he had lived in years before and fled;
or see old friends, although they never wrote; old
battlefields in Nam, where he had fought and bled; at least
New York, which he had never visited (although he loved
the song,) but when he totted up the cost, this place
and that, he couldn’t leave LA, which wasn’t bad, with such
a bunch of things to see and do, and then he thought a ticket
to a play and dinner just for him, but that would set him
back a hundred bucks or more and he’d just spent
a fortune on the cats, yet knew some celebration was
in order here, and bought a jar of moonshine from the guy
next door and rented Sound of Music for his VCR.