A love poem that begins by scolding itself is already more honest than most. "Oh, how I wish," the speaker starts, and before the sentence gets going she interrupts herself with a parenthesis: she really shouldn't wish, "because look where wishing has gotten me." Everything that follows lives inside that tension. "A Wish" is about an unspoken crush. The speaker wants to be asked to Homecoming, danced with, told she looks pretty, and she is just as busy wishing the wanting would stop. Its central idea is that longing can become a trap you recognise and still can't leave.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and that suits it. The lines are short and the words plain, so it reads like speech. The opening run of "I wish" lines works like a chant, or like someone circling a thought she can't put down. The wishes also shrink as they go. She begins with the grand "I wish you were mine," moves to a dance, and ends up asking only to look at him "without blushing with regret" and to talk to him "without feeling shy and strange." "Blushing with regret" is an odd, revealing phrase. You would expect embarrassment, but regret suggests she is already mourning a conversation that hasn't happened.
The middle of the poem gets specific. The "heather-grey t-shirt" and the eyes that are "green but kinda blue" show someone who has studied him closely and is too flustered to find a polished phrase. That "kinda" is the sound of a real teenager, not a poet performing one. Then the tense slips. "It just isn't fair" becomes "It just wasn't fair," as if the moment were turning into memory while she writes. The word "right" then bounces back at her: "it wasn't right / I wasn't right / (Though I'm never quite right around you)." The wrongness starts in the situation and settles on herself.
The best passage is the speaker arguing with her own mind. He is "either too shy" or has "long since though[t] this through", and both options make her stomach sink. She decides the second is worse, then stops: "No / The former." That one-word line is where the rhythm and the meaning meet, because we hear a thought being revised as it happens. The parenthetical "(How could I decide?)" is the private voice breaking into the public one, the same trick as the poem's first line.
Then "wish" gives way to "wonder," and the poem turns from wanting to asking. The most striking image is the speaker describing herself in the third person: "a girl is writing for you / Sweet nothings and wishes / And blushes on paper." Calling herself "a girl" lets her say everything while staying anonymous. The blush, which she couldn't control in his presence, has moved onto the page. "Sweet nothings" is a stock phrase, but here it carries a sting, since she half-suspects the writing amounts to nothing.
The ending refuses to resolve. She wonders if she could "stop these damn wishes / Get over you / And get on with my life," and the flat, practical wording sounds like a pep talk she doesn't quite believe. The last two lines are "I wonder / I wish." The poem finishes on the habit it swore to break, and it loops back to its opening.
What makes it worth reading is that honesty. It doesn't dress a crush up as tragedy or shrink it into a joke. The details (Homecoming, the t-shirt, the stomach sinking) suggest an American high-school setting, and the feeling is small in scale but not in force. The poem lets the speaker contradict herself, stumble, and swear, and it trusts that readers will recognise the experience. Anyone who has rehearsed a conversation they never had will know it.