Articles Available Online

Last summer, after an eight-hour shift with barely enough time for a piss break, I walked out of a yet another café job This wasn’t something I was in any kind of financial position to do, but the expectations placed on me vastly outstripped my hourly wage, and I at least try to maintain a certain standard in the cesspool that is the post-austerity job market As a consequence, I have spent the last few months pursuing money by other means In July, I listed clothes on eBay, purchased in times of fleeting affluence In August, I cycled through alternating waves of heat and sheets of rain to throw buckets of boiling water down mysteriously blocked urinals and mop floors until my jeans were damp with sweat In between these crumbs of work, and spikes of tight-chested panic, I’ve been reading Michelle Tea   I often return to Michelle Tea’s writing when I’m sick of my place in the world The chaos of her writing, and the scrappy eloquence with which she describes her own working-class background, remind me that a bad or boring experience, when written down, can become a story I was at university in a small English seaside town when I discovered  Tea and her lesbian feminist punk-poetry collective, Sister Spit – who toured the US in an infamously raucous van during the mid-nineties and also included writers such as New York’s cult lesbian poet Eileen Myles and riot-grrrl documentary maker Sini Anderson Following their internet trail revealed a grainy YouTube video of a young Michelle with dirty hair, her heavily tattooed arms wrapped around a mic stand, reciting poetry with all the urgency of a planet about to implode Michelle Tea was the first scruffy, working-class queer woman I had heard speak out about being a scruffy, working-class queer woman Her voice shot up like a bright, tenacious weed from beneath the rubble of almost-exclusively male beat poets that had, up to that point, comprised my poetry education If poetry was something that could be extracted from experiences so similar to my own, then perhaps poetry was