Noli Me Tangere
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I know obsession, & I'm not talking the '80s-era Calvin Klein
cologne that evokes expensive nudity. I know what it's like

to narrate your entire day in your head to one person
even though you would never actually tell them half

of what you're thinking, because who wouldn't be overwhelmed
by that kind of attention? When I was a kid, we'd scour the corners

of empty lots for touch-me-not seedpods—pendants with
projectiles that explode open when you squeeze them

even lightly between two fingers. What does it mean
to contain a latent excess of everything—not just desire,

but also memory? Like I can clearly recall the exact chartreuse
my friend painted his Brooklyn rental in 1997—this was the

apartment we all called The Want because something was always
broken, waiting to be jerry-rigged back together with duct tape

& spit until one afternoon the brick façade literally crumbled
off the building and hit the sidewalk below, like the brownstone

had overflowed or expanded its heart to embrace all the post-
college energy sex roommates DJ equipment drum & bass pizza

fake fur electric guitars & velvet, the girl-groupies hanging out
well into dawn. Tell me: how do you suppress tamp down

overcome kill bury fuck away compartmentalize this abundance
of I want to enter & inhabit? What I'm saying is that I'm always

pretending, turning down the volume, staying more & more
silent. We call this restraint, the way a hand hovers over something

for a minute then pulls away. Noli me tangere, said Jesus to Mary
in John 20:17 when she recognized him after the resurrection, &

what would have happened if she had touched him, held on
to him, clung to him? There are many translations. Would he

have split open, translucent & jeweled? Picasso used
Antonio da Correggio's painting Noli Me Tangere

as a source for his famous La Vie, though the two paintings
don't really resemble each other at all. In the first, Mary kneels

at Jesus's feet in a billowing yellow dress looking up at him
with some kind of yearning, arms held away from her body

like small wings, or a baseball referee motioning the runner
is safe. She is trying hard not to touch Jesus, though he is half-

naked & his right hand points delicately at her breasts.
In the Picasso—part of his Blue Period when his subjects

were often beggars, drunks and prostitutes—a naked woman,
standing, rests her head on a man's clavicle. One of her legs

pushes between his thighs, grazing. They are entwined, sad,
tinted blue-gray. Art historians call the period cold, austere,

doleful, melancholy, maybe triggered by the suicide of his best friend,
Carlos Casagemas, who became infatuated with a woman named

Germaine who didn't return his affections so he drank, used morphine,
& finally tried to kill her—then shot himself in the head at a café.

Listen, Carlos: I know what it's like to love & not be loved in return.
To drown yourself in that kind of obsession. There are latent fires

in all of us teetering on the edge of the overwhelm unless we
shut them in the smallest rooms of our brains, don't open

any of the old texts & DMs, stop scrolling through
grainy digital images on our tiny screens. Touch me not.

Touch me. I am positive there are things that should not be
disturbed, but my instinct is to prod whatever it is with a stick

to see if it stirs, to make it burst open or ejaculate with maggots,
with blood, with ecstasy joy nostalgia anticipation—to press

& press the buttons on your body even when they're broken
because who knows what's really irreparable & what just needs

more attention. In medicine, the phrase noli me tangere is taught
to surgical students regarding organs that are notoriously delicate

or prone to complications if disturbed; the most common
invocation concerns the heart.

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Copyright © 2022 Erika Meitner All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission