"Stain" begins with a sentence that has lost its head. "Of period blood" dangles in the air, and only the title and the refrain "The Stain" can supply the missing noun. That gap sets up the poem's main idea. The mark a relationship leaves behind, normally the thing we scrub away, ends up as the only proof it happened. By the last stanza the speaker has "all I have to remember your touch" and nothing else.
The first two stanzas are lists, and the way they mix categories is the most interesting thing about them. "Period blood" sits beside "Conflicts of interest" and "Bad timing", so a bodily fact and an emotional one get equal weight. The word "period" may also carry a second meaning, a stretch of time or even a full stop, so that "bad timing" and "period blood" quietly echo each other. That is an inference, but the poem's wordplay seems to invite it. The second list, "Control and chaos / Destructive impulses / Delusions of grandeur", reads like a catalogue of the worst moods of a couple. Each stanza closes on "The Stain" with a capital letter, as if it were a name or a verdict.
Then the poem moves into the house. "Your Scent / Pried from the jaws of the washing machine / Clings hard to my favorite clothes." The verbs are violent: the scent is "pried" loose, and the machine has "jaws", like an animal. Yet the cleaning fails, because smell survives the wash. Another gap follows in "Stains , ,", where the commas trail off with nothing after them. Judging by the layout, the speaker's list falters, as though the words ran out before the feeling did. The stains then become "birthmarks", marks you cannot wash off because you were born with them. The speaker sees the lover "reflected" in them, so the stain works like a mirror.
Water soaks the middle of the poem. "Wet and vulnerable" suggests both newborns and lovers, and the phrase "Renewed to affection" turns the cycle of a quarrel and a reconciliation into a kind of rebirth. The menstrual image fits here too, since a cycle is something that renews. Then comes a darker line: "Died in our sleep every night." The couple lay side by side and still seemed to vanish from each other, though they "clung hard to a mutual understanding". That "clung hard" echoes the earlier "Clings hard", so the scent on the clothes and the fragile agreement between the two people are held in the same grip.
The closing water metaphor is the poem's most ambitious. "Our water flowed with different currents / Though they explode as they collide / Still swept away in separate tides." Water doesn't normally explode, and the strangeness is the point, because closeness and violence turn out to be the same event. The near-rhyme of "collide" and "tides" is the nearest the poem comes to a chime, and it lands just as the lovers are pulled apart. No one is blamed. The currents simply differ, and the tides do the rest.
Formally, "Stain" is free verse, with no regular rhythm or rhyme scheme. Its stanzas run four, four, three, five, five and three lines. The lines are short and almost unpunctuated, which makes the images arrive one after another without argument. The structure is circular. The opening fragment "Of period blood" returns in the last stanza, but now it follows "the Stain", and for the first time the grammar resolves with the verb "Is". The poem's long, hanging sentence finally closes.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to be embarrassed. Menstrual blood is often treated as something to hide or euphemise, and here it becomes the emblem of intimacy and its aftermath, with no apology. The poem also finds loss in the domestic details of washing, scent and clothes rather than in grand statements of grief. The stain starts as a list of faults and ends as a keepsake, and the poem leaves open whether the speaker finds that comforting or unbearable.