Claire Walker, "How to Shape Our Mouths"

 

Claire Walker’s poetry has been nominated for the Forward Prizes, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work is published in journals and anthologies including Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Finished Creatures, Dust, Aesthetica, and Ten Poems about Daughters (Candlestick Press). Her new pamphlet is How to Shape Our Mouths (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2026). Claire is co-editor of Atrium poetry webzine, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Birmingham.

About How to Shape Our Mouths, by Claire Walker
How to Shape Our Mouths is a consideration of womanhood, exploring experiences of artists, writers, muses, mothers and daughters, often through an ekphrastic lens. 

You can read more about How to Shape Our Mouths on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From How to Shape Our Mouths

In which I am one of Modigliani’s nudes

We share a cigarette at the window, blow smoke out into the evening. This is our 1917 Paris skyline, and you are in full bloom, the exhibition imminent. We’re down to embers, so I remove my robe, the cliched silk slipping easily away. I move to the couch and recline. There is tenderness as you ask if I’m comfortable. Amedeo, here I’m so comfortable I could dream. You lift my head, place another cushion for me to rest on. By now, you have a reputation for drink, though you’re not yet tragic, and I am not yet grieving. The walls of your studio are blush-soft. You take up your brush, mix colours to match my hair, contemplate the correct earthy tone for my skin. My spine uncurls, my neck grows long upon the canvas. Here, we are comrades, the moment both abstract and acute. Let’s take my sadness, your poor health, and let’s make something beautiful. This is not sex, or love. There is a little pigment of my heart that wishes to be seen, and there is your longing for greatness. Come, see you whisper. I notice you have captured the exact shade of my irises, the exact shape of my eyes, not your go-to almond form. You tell me you’ll paint the background warm and red like the soul. Modi, by now, all the good light has gone. We circle back, we share a cigarette, blow smoke out into the Paris night. A night so black we no longer see our breath escaping us.

Unzipped

"It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out" - Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

After I gave birth to my daughter,

I cradled her on the crisp clean sheets.

My body grew a new version of me,

one long exhale, skin unzipped 

and out she slid, quiet and instinctive. 

I knew how to hold the girl, 

was so sure of this fresh employment. 

My baby and I made friends with ourselves 

and those like us. I felt sweet at ease 

teaching how to feed, smile, count on fingers, 

how to shape our mouths into mama.

  

At thirteen, our certainty is delicate 

as sugar work. Those two, who slipped 

knowingly from me, have less to say. 

Still entwined by blood and love,

some days laughter halts in thickened air. 

The bared teeth of that zip pull away, 

come apart. And although we remember 

how to smile, sometimes our mouths cloy 

with stuck apologies. There is a confusion

within us. Those people we once knew —

not quite gone, not quite there either.