Add "-ish" to a word and you have bought yourself an escape route. Dinner at seven-ish, tall-ish, fine-ish: the suffix lets us say something without quite committing to it. In "'ish," by Domin Sweet, that everyday habit of speech is turned on the hardest thing to be exact about, a relationship that has ended. The speaker describes a love that was "love'ish," a woman who was "mine'ish," a pain that was "hurt'ish," and an absence that is only "gone'ish." The central idea is that hedging is a way of protecting yourself, and that the protection fails. The more the speaker shrinks each word, the more we feel how much is being shrunk.
The construction is strict. Lines one, two, three and five each run to nine syllables if "-ish" is counted as a syllable, and each ends on the same trailing sound. That repeated ending works like a refrain, or an identical rhyme, in a poem with no conventional rhyme scheme. The first two lines use a "not X but X'ish" formula in which the denied word and its replacement are the same word. Only the suffix changes. The speaker does not reach for a better word, just a weaker version of the first. In line three the "but" disappears: "it did not hurt it only hurt'ish." There is no punctuation anywhere in the poem, so the clauses tumble together, the way you rush when you are insisting you're fine. "Only" appears twice, in lines three and five, and it is the speaker's most anxious word. People tend to say "only" when someone has suggested it was a lot.
The break comes in line four, "when we left there." It has just four syllables, less than half the length of its neighbours, and it is the only line with no "-ish." It is also the only plain statement in the poem. Everything else is negotiable, but the leaving is simply reported. The line is oddly open, though. We never learn where "there" is, and "we left" could mean leaving a place, a time, or the relationship itself. Judging by the way the line sits in the middle like a gap, the poem seems to hold its real event in a space the speaker won't fill with commentary.
The punctuation deserves a closer look. An apostrophe normally marks something missing, as in "don't," or something owned, as in "her hand." "-ish" needs neither, so the apostrophe is a surprise, and it can be read both ways. As a mark of omission, it hints at a missing root, something left out of the word and out of the relationship. The title, "'ish," pushes this further: it is a suffix with nothing to attach to, a hedge with no noun to hedge. As a mark of possession, it quietly mocks "mine'ish," since the speaker half-claims her and half-lets go in a single word. The sound matters too. "Ish" ends in "sh," the noise we make to quiet a child, so each line seems to hush itself.
The tense changes in the last line. The first three lines are in the past ("was," "did"), but the final one says "she is not gone." Here the hedge turns out to cut both ways. "Gone'ish" means less gone than gone, so the very device that softens the pain also keeps her partly in the room. The speaker cannot say she is here, and cannot bear to say she is not, so the language settles on the blur between. The poem does not tell us whether this is comfort or denial, and it is stronger for leaving that open.
The poem is worth reading because it gets a lot out of very little. It has no elaborate imagery, just one made-up habit of speech repeated until it begins to ache. It shows how understatement can be louder than declaration, since a speaker who insists a loss is small makes us suspect it is large. It also shows how casual, even jokey, language can carry real grief, and how the words people use to avoid saying something often end up saying it.