The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn by Natalie Diaz

Powered unicorn horn was once thought to cure melancholy.

What carries the hurt is never the wound but the red garden sewn by the horn as it left—and she left. I am rosing, blossoming absence—a brilliant alarum.

Brodsky said, Darkness restores what light cannot repair. You thrilled me—torn to the comb. I want everything—the ebon bull and the moon. I come and again for the honeyed horn.

Queen Elizabeth traded a castle for a single horn. I serve the kingdom of my hands— an army of touch marching the alcázar of your thighs blaring and bright as any war horn.

I arrive at you—half bestia, half feast. Night after night we harvest the luxed Bosque de Caderas, reap the darkful fruit mulling our mouths, separate sweet from thron.

My lanternist. Your hands wick at the bronzed lamp of my breast. Strike me to spark— tremble me to awe. Into your lap let me lay my heavy horns.

I fulfilled the prophecy of your throat, loosed in you the fabulous wing of my mouth. Red holy-red ghost. Left my body and spoke to God, came back seraphimed—copper feathered and horned.

Our bodies are nothing if not places to be had by, as in, God, she had me by the throat, by the hip bone, by the moon. God, she hurt me with my own horns.

— Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Page 77)