My name is Potter Gotuma and my friends tell me that I'm the kind of person that they usually

would not want to sit next to on a plane if they didn't know me because my preference is to

talk to whoever's next to me. On a flight recently somebody leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder

and said, where did you get your slippers? And I was delighted to talk to them. Another time somebody tapped me on their shoulder and said, are you writing a poem? And I was.

She was an English teacher and then she came along to the poetry reading. I was giving the next night.

This, to my mind, just indicates how interesting the world is and probably indicates the kind of poems that I gravitate to sometimes in poetry unbound.

I love poems that describe

when somebody in the room does something that was unexpected that causes a ripple amongst the

other people there. They're not sure what to do and they'll have a story to tell but also it'll

reveal something about them. The singing by Rick Barrett.

There are eight of us in the waiting room of the service department in the car dealership.

Some are reading newspapers or scrolling on their phones or watching the TV with the news on, the sound off.

There's a woman sitting in the corner looking down at her phone. She is humming very softly. The room is more like a lounge just off the lobby of a nice

hotel with tall plants and couches. I am reading paperwork for my job,

one part of my mind thinking about that, another part thinking about the things the mechanic

might find wrong with my car, acting like it has a bad cough. The humming woman is sitting near enough that I can hear her humming begin to take on words

in a language I don't know. It sounds like an African language. It's soft registers making me think

the woman is singing a lullaby or a nostalgic song about a landscape.

Though for all I know, she might be singing about a war or the clanging streets of a city.

In the half hour, all of us are there together.

No one entering the room, no one called away. The woman's humming begins to turn insistently into singing.

As her voice gets louder and lifts into what must be the song's sad ecstasy,

...