My aunts had names like sugar and spice

Maybe they started in a doll’s house,
where the world was rainbows and unicorns.
Their lives changed colours,
but their names stayed the same.

Pinky stayed Pinky
through the heartache of two divorces
and several betrayals,
the palette her name evoked
stayed Hello Kitty
even when the skies in her life turned grey.

The cancer hollowed her on the inside
but Bubbly was still Bubbly.
She had fed from tubes for so long
the sight of qeema made her cry;
she looked at the glistening mince
the way other women look at diamonds.

Was it a dark coincidence of her name
that the hospital boy said
she was light as a balloon?

Dolly was married so young that
until the day her husband died,
people kept asking her if he was her father.
From a doll’s house, she moved straight
to an ancestral one ‘in her charge’.

Just when you thought
she would have sobered in her taste,
she builds a house in Valencia
with her husband’s leftover wealth.
It looks like it’s drawn
with the crayons of a child,
from the lens of someone
for whom the sunlight is still spotless
and a fairy lurks somewhere
in the background.

A grandmother now,
at weddings, she dances a storm.
She is undoing a life sentence;
‘In our family, we don’t do nonsense like this.’

When their lives changed colours,
the fluorescent fairydoms of their names
were all they had;
the doll’s houses they left unfinished,
the blindfolds that were yanked off
before their turn was over,
the music in their bones
that was left unsung.