Six short lines, no title, no punctuation at the end, and yet there is a whole life of being misread packed into them. Elijah's poem is built from three things other people say and three flat verdicts on them. Nobody tells us what the correct word would be. The poem is about being described wrongly, and about the quiet, tired authority of the person who knows the description is wrong.
The first line is a familiar announcement: "its a girl". It is the sentence that greets a baby at birth, the first label anyone receives. Elijah's answer is a single word, "wrong". The poem judging that moment as a mistake from the very start is startling, because we usually treat that sentence as plain fact. The poem suggests, though it never says so outright, that the speaker's sense of self does not match the words handed to them. That is an inference from the text, but the whole structure supports it.
What makes the construction clever is the way the three quoted phrases move. We begin with a complete statement, "its a girl". Next comes a plural noun, "princesses", which sounds like the fairy-tale world adults build around girls: crowns, pink, expectations arriving in bulk. The plural matters. The speaker is not being addressed as an individual but swept into a crowd. Last comes the smallest word of all, the pronoun "she". The poem narrows from the announcement to the fantasy to a single syllable, and the pronoun may be the most intimate wrongness, because it is the word people use every time they speak about you when you are not the one being addressed.
The speaker's responses change too. "Wrong" is blunt. "Also wrong" adds a note of accumulation, as if the speaker is ticking off a list. "Again, wrong" is the most revealing, because the comma gives it a sigh. The repetition has become exhausting. Nothing has been argued or explained, only corrected, and the word "again" tells us this has happened many times before. The poem has no rhyme, but "wrong" returns like a refrain and does the work a rhyme would, tying the pairs together and giving each a heavy final beat. The rhythm is stop-start: the quoted phrases are short and slightly different in length, and then the verdict lands like a door closing.
The typography deserves attention. The quotation marks have spaces inside them, so each phrase sits in its own little box, held at arm's length. The missing apostrophe in "its" and the lowercase, unpunctuated style give the quoted voices a casual, careless sound, as though these labels are tossed out without a second thought. That carelessness is part of the point. For the people speaking, the words cost nothing. For the person receiving them, they obviously cost something.
Notice also who is not in quotation marks. Every phrase from the outside world is fenced off, while Elijah's own word, "wrong", stands bare on the page. The speaker's voice is the only one that is not being reported, and the only one that is trusted. There is something of the classroom in that word too. "Wrong" is what a teacher writes in the margin, so the poem quietly reverses a familiar power relationship: the world has been handing out labels all this time, and now the speaker is the one marking them.
The poem's silence is its boldest move. The title is just three asterisks, a blank stand-in for a name, which suits a poem about names and words that do not fit. We never learn what the right word is. Perhaps it is unsaid because the speaker doesn't owe anyone an answer, or because the correct word is something other people have no right to hand over. Either way, the reader is left standing in the gap, forced to feel how it is to be told what you are and to have only "no" for a reply.
That economy is what makes the poem significant. It uses almost nothing, six lines and a handful of words, to show how repetition wears a person down, and it trusts the reader to supply the rest.