Dandelion fluff, a loose eyelash, birthday candles: most of us learn as children that these small things can carry a secret request. Sarah's "every wish" borrows that childhood magic and turns it into something rueful. The speaker looks back over all her wishing and realises she aimed it at the wrong target. The poem confesses a mistake more than it accuses anyone, and that gives it its quiet sting.
The first three images are chosen with care. Dandelions, eyelashes and candles are all everyday rituals, things you blow on or blow out, and none of them is serious or grand. The list has no commas, so the items slide past one another, and the line breaks do the work of separating them. That rhythm suits the subject. Wishing here is a habit repeated so often it has become automatic. Then comes the hyperbole of "every type of wish". Folk tales usually limit wishes to three, so "every" suggests a speaker who has spent far more than her share, and the word "used" makes the wishes sound like a resource, now gone.
The preposition matters just as much. She does not wish for boys like you, she wishes "on" them, as one wishes on a star. The boys become the object that receives the hope, the thing looked up at and trusted, and the phrase "boys like you" turns one particular person into a type. It addresses him directly while declining to treat him as special. The word "boys" is also pointed, since it implies something unfinished or immature. The tone is dry and not furious, and the dryness suggests she has had time to recover.
Structurally, the poem is nine short lines forming a single sentence, with one full stop at the very end. Everything is lowercase, even the "i", which gives the voice the casual, confessional feel of a note jotted down or a thought half-said. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem relies on enjambment, and the breaks are placed deliberately. "Wishing" gets a line to itself, so the word hangs there, as if the speaker pauses over her own verb. The most striking break comes at "completely the / opposite". The line ends on "the" and leaves the reader waiting, and "opposite" then lands alone on the final line, a word that sits apart at the end of the poem. The form enacts the idea, since the last word is physically set apart from everything before it.
The ending is also ambiguous, and the ambiguity is productive. The opposite of what? Of "boys like you" presumably, but the poem never says whether she means someone kinder, steadier or simply different in character. Leaving it open lets the reader fill in their own disappointment. Notice too the phrase "when i should have been". The blame turns inward. The speaker does not say he was a bad choice, she says she wished badly. There is a second irony underneath that, which is an inference from the wording rather than a stated fact. If she wished "on boys like you", then perhaps the wishes worked, and she got exactly what she asked for. The regret is that she asked for the wrong thing.
The final line still contains hope, though. She does not conclude that wishing is foolish. She says she should have been "wishing / for one completely the / opposite", which suggests the habit survives and only its aim needs correcting. That small hopeful note keeps the poem from becoming simply bitter.
The poem is significant because it compresses a recognisable experience into very little space. Many people have looked back at an old crush and felt both embarrassment and a tender kind of foolishness. By setting that feeling against the innocent machinery of childhood wishes, the poem shows how romantic disappointment can seem to reach back and spoil even our simplest hopes. It manages this without a single dramatic event, only a list, a pivot and a one-word ending.