Seven short lines, two voices, and an argument that never changes direction: that is all Elijah gives us, and it is enough. The poem has no title, only a row of asterisks, and no date comes with it, so the words have to carry everything. They stage a quarrel over identity. One speaker says he is a boy. The other refuses to accept it, hands him a name he rejects, and finishes by insisting he is a girl.
There are no speech tags or quotation marks, but the pattern is easy to read. Lines one, three, five and seven belong to the speaker claiming to be a boy, and lines two, four and six to the one who contradicts him. This is an inference from the back-and-forth, but a sturdy one, and it means the first voice both opens and closes the poem. The person being denied gets the last word, though not an easy victory.
The poem is built almost entirely from pronouns and small verbs: *im*, *youre*, *thats*, *its*. It has no description and no metaphor, and that absence is the point. The poem is about the words we use for each other, so it uses almost nothing else. The fourth line, "well im calling you it...", is the most unsettling. "It" could stand in for the unwanted name, but it could also be the other speaker's word for the person, a pronoun that strips away personhood. The poem leaves this open, and both readings hurt. The reply is clever: "its he..." takes the offending word and corrects it from inside, folding "it" into "he." A speaker who has no power in the exchange still manages a small, quick piece of wordplay.
The sound and shape of the lines add to this. They are clipped, mostly single-syllable words, and they read like overheard speech or a fast exchange of messages. Line lengths follow the emotional shifts. "im a boy" has three syllables, and the aggressor's taunt, "well im calling you it," stretches to six, the longest line, swaggering and a little childish, like a playground retort. The shortest line, "its he," has only two syllables, and both land hard. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Rhyme would make the quarrel feel neat, and this one is not neat.
Punctuation does a lot of quiet work. Six of the seven lines end in an ellipsis, which can read as trailing off, hesitation, or the tiredness of having said the same thing before. Only the last line ends in a full stop: "im not a girl." The dots never resolve into anything firm until the speaker closes the sentence himself. The missing capitals and apostrophes also matter. Even the word "I" is lowercase, so the self being defended looks small on the page. Yet it keeps turning up at the start of lines (*im a boy*, *im calling*, *im not*), a stubborn little marker of presence.
The ending turns on a reversal. The poem begins with a positive statement, "im a boy," and ends with a negative one, "im not a girl." Between those lines the speaker has been pushed from saying who he is to saying what he is not. He also picks up the word *not* that was used against him in line two ("no youre not") and uses it to shut the argument. The structure loops: claim, denial, claim, denial, and then a refusal that is firm but leaves the dispute unresolved. The other speaker never says anything that suggests a change of mind.
The poem is significant because it shows how identity is fought over in ordinary language rather than in grand declarations. Nobody shouts and there are no exclamation marks. The cruelty lies in plain, almost casual phrases, and the defence is equally plain. It also withholds a setting and any detail about who the second speaker is, so readers fill the gap with people they know: a classmate, a relative, a stranger. Whether or not the poem draws on lived experience, which the text does not tell us, it makes the stakes clear in a few words. Being called by the right name and the right pronoun is not a small courtesy, and having to argue for it, over and over, wears a person down.