Scott Owens		A Personal History of Rock and Roll I learned to play these songs in my head when he’d yell. I watched when he spoke to others, learning by inversion how soft a voice had to be to be heard, how long it took to understand, how much patience, how much care, how giving the hand to anything it touched. I remember my brother shrinking before him, my mother leaping up only to be knocked down again and again. When it came my turn before the fire, my hand on the electric stove, I heard in my head Neil Young’s “Helpless,” “We Have All Been Here Before,” and determined never again. Where I didn’t know the words, I made them up. Where I didn’t know the music I made it up. When the tears took me by the throat I still sang in my head, “All Along the Watchtower,” “Summer Breeze Don’t Fly Away.”		Scarcity Model How do you write about bittersweet relics of the past when you had so little? No crystal chess set or cherry armoire. Only trailer parks and hand-me-down clothes. I’ve never seen a poem about pinto beans three days in a row, milk gravy on toast, meat from a can, chunks of candy stolen from the corner store, bus stop benches all graffiti and cigarette butts, laundromats, cheese lines, vacant lots, a single dreaded willow, storm drains, playing hooky beneath the railroad bridge, chicken beneath the trains, a scatter of roaches when the lights come on. The riprap of poverty pieced together like anything made of scraps, not the sort of thing you revisit, find meaning in, cling to on dark nights. Still, a foundation of sorts, a negative space, at least, however crumbling, however unsettling, however unlikely to stand.