Some feelings resist definition so stubbornly that the only honest thing to say is that they are what they are. That is the move Abbie makes in "missing is missing." The title is a circle. Ask what missing someone means and the poem answers with the same words you asked with. Nothing is known here about who is being missed, or why, and the poem never says. All it gives us is the experience itself, stripped of backstory.
The central idea is that longing cannot be managed. The speaker lists the ways we usually try to tame a feeling by giving it a direction, a schedule or a permitted setting, and then removes each one. "There is no right or left to it" borrows the language of directions, as though missing someone were a place you could be lost in without a map. "Right" also means correct, so the line can be read as saying there is no correct way to do this, though that second meaning is an interpretation rather than something the poem states. Next comes "no appropriate time or place," which hints at social rules: when it is acceptable to feel sad, when you are supposed to have recovered. The feeling ignores them.
The language is deliberately plain. Nothing in the poem is a metaphor in the usual sense, and there is no extended image of storms or oceans, which is how many poems about loss dress up their feelings. The only figurative note is the directional "right or left," and even that is everyday vocabulary. This plainness feels like part of the argument. If missing someone is beyond control, then elaborate decoration would seem false, a way of pretending the feeling has been understood and tidied.
The sound and rhythm support this. There is no rhyme scheme, but the word "it" ends both the first and third lines ("right or left to it," "You just do it"), so the poem seems to circle back on itself, like the title. The sentences are short and speech-like, and the lines vary in length. The third line is the shortest and almost blunt: "You just do it." The phrase is a common slogan, usually urging people to act through willpower. Here it is turned upside down, because the speaker has no choice. Missing is something that happens to you, even though the grammar says you "do" it.
The pronouns are worth noticing. The poem speaks almost entirely in "you": "when you miss a person," "You just do it," "You can't control it." This makes the experience sound universal, as if the speaker were stating a fact about human beings. Then "I swear" arrives, the only "I" in the poem, and the stance changes. An oath is what we reach for when we fear we won't be believed, so the phrase suggests that the speaker is speaking from the inside after all. The general rule turns out to be personal, and "you" may partly be a shield for "I." The comma after "swear" also breaks the line before the last statement, as though the speaker has to gather themselves.
"Or anything" is perhaps the most unsettling moment. "You can't control it" is a sad enough admission, but the fragment "Or anything" widens it: missing someone has exposed how little control the speaker has over anything. A small private feeling is made to stand for a larger helplessness, and the poem says so in just two words.
The final line returns to the title with a capital letter: "Missing is missing." Repeated, the tautology no longer sounds evasive. It sounds like acceptance, or at least exhaustion with the effort to explain. The shift from the lowercase, full-stopped title to the sentence that closes the poem also makes the repetition feel like an ending, not a mere echo.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about the limits of language. It does not offer comfort, a lesson or a resolution. It trusts that anyone who has missed someone will recognise the feeling without being told what it is like, and for a reader who has, the lack of decoration can be more convincing than a polished image would be. In five short lines, the poem shows that sometimes the most truthful sentence is the one that explains nothing.