Don Simms and the Invisible

Darren Morris
Published on October 8, 2026

With the toe of his shoe, he made 

an invisible X in the lane near the basket.

 

He told me to stand right there

and not to fucking move. Inside the X,

 

I was still trying to see myself in the invisible. 

So he moved me by the shoulders onto the spot.

 

He gave me the ball. Shoot it, dummy.

It went up but it didn't touch anything.

 

It went up without vigor and came back down. 

I tried to catch it but failed at even that.

 

Look at the backboard not the basket. Make

an X at the point within the red square.

 

Aim for that. He took the ball from me and said watch 

where it kisses. The shot was neither graceful nor athletic,

 

but it went in. Ain't no magic to it. It's mathematical. 

Do the same from your side. See that invisible X

 

on the backboard? You hit that spot, we get two points. 

The ball felt like lead in my hands, but he was right, it went in.

 

Now we gonna repeat that until your arms fall off,

until the X is no longer invisible and then you'll be useful.

 

I started shooting. I wasn't allowed to leave my X.

He got the deaf kid to fetch the shots and pass me the ball.

 

He watched me for the first twenty until he knew

I would continue, even if I was forced by my fear of him.

 

He said, that' s your job now. And a job ain't any fun,

but if you did it enough, you could kind of forget about it.

 

In a few years, you'll find yourself at some desk job at dawn

and you won't even remember waking up. Good sign.

 

It meant the job was disappearing, becoming a part of you.

Or you might go inside the job until you could not discern.

 

But if you could do it, repeatedly, without

objection, and continue without considering 

 

any sort of ending that would ever contain

the discovery of even one invisible X,

 

then you might be called a man. You know

what I did in Vietnam? I cleared mines. Ordnance.

 

Now is the time for attempt and flat failure. 

If you persist without complaint, then this team

 

might even win a game on Tuesday night. 

Win or not, Coach Simms, like all our fathers

 

would be at his job the next morning, supervised,

remembering nothing of his life teaching boys

 

about the two invisible Xs connected by the conduit 

of vision, muscle memory, and desire, and directed

 

by the mind's eye to some fleeting fantasy of success.

You are a machine, doing your job but with a terrible secret.

 

A fear that if ever divulged would hurl you off the edge 

of the world. Mind your hope, boy. Hope is a booby trap.

Genre: 
Poetry
Author Bio: 

Darren Morris is a writer living in Richmond, Virginia, who has lost much of his sight to retinitis pigmentosa. His long form poem, “Eisegesis 1-3,” won the 2024 Experimental Poetry Prize from the Connecticut Poetry Society. His poems have recently appeared in Midway Journal, Stone Circle Review, Willow Springs Magazine, Redivider and The Yale Review. Work is forthcoming from the American Poetry Review and Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature. In 2026 his full-length manuscript was a finalist for the Cardinal Poetry Prize from Wesleyan University Press.

Issue: 
62