Almost everyone has watched a bruise change color, prodding it in the mirror to see what it will do next. "Bruises" takes that ordinary habit and turns it into five lines. On the surface it is a short natural history of an injury, from fresh red to final disappearance. Underneath, it suggests that healing is not clean or pretty, and that the body's recovery can feel like a kind of contamination. The poem gives no date and no context, and it never says who did the hurting, so the reading below rests on the words alone.
The structure follows the bruise itself. The first line, "they start out as red," is plain and almost casual, the voice of someone explaining something simple. The second line stretches out: "then purple and black and green and yellow." The repeated "and" gives the line a slow, accumulating drag, as if days are being compressed into a single breath. Each color arrives separately, like a stage in a process that can't be hurried. The poem is as exact here as a medical chart, and the specificity of the list makes what follows more unsettling.
The turn comes in line three. Up to this point the colors are named, but the last one isn't. It becomes "that sickening, infested color," described only by how it makes the speaker feel. The poem moves from observing to judging. "Sickening" is a word about the viewer's stomach as much as about the skin. "Infested" is the most striking choice in the poem. It belongs to insects and rot, not to injuries, and it makes the bruise seem alive, something that has moved in and is spreading under the surface. The pronoun "they" in the first line, with no noun until the title supplies one, already treats bruises as a population rather than a single mark.
The sound of the poem supports this. Lines three to five are full of hissing consonants: "sickening," "infested," "seeps," "skin," "disappears." The sibilance gives the ending a quiet, creeping texture, like something liquid sliding away. "Seeps back into your skin" is especially uncomfortable, because "seeps" suggests a leak or a stain, and "back" implies that the skin reabsorbs the damage rather than shedding it. The harm is not removed. It is taken in and hidden.
That leads to the final line, which is the poem's quiet sting: "and disappears." It is the shortest line, and it begins with the same "and" that linked the colors, so the list keeps going right up to the moment it ends. Disappearance should be good news, but here it carries an edge. When the bruise vanishes, so does the evidence, and the injury leaves nothing for anyone else to see. The poem never says whether this is relief or loss, and it leaves both possible.
Two other choices matter. First, the poem uses "your" rather than "my." Addressing the reader makes the experience shared and slightly invasive, as though the bruise is ours. Second, there are no capital letters and no punctuation at all, not even a full stop. Without a period the poem simply stops, the way a bruise does, with no ceremony to mark the end. The lowercase, low-volume manner also suits the subject. Nothing is shouted, and the understatement lets the disturbing words, "sickening" and "infested," do their work without help.
Whether the speaker means a physical bruise or something emotional is not settled by the text. The poem doesn't name a cause, and the bare, observational tone could fit either. A reader could take it as a literal description or as a figure for any hurt that changes shape, grows ugly, and then fades without being acknowledged. That openness is part of its strength.
The poem is significant because it refuses the comforting story that wounds heal neatly. It watches the process closely, admits that the middle stages are repellent, and lets the ending feel unresolved. In five short lines it shows how much can be done by naming colors, choosing one disturbing word, and stopping at the right moment.