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“When you know what a man wants you know who he is, and how to move him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“I do not know how old I was when I learned to play chess. I could not have been older than eight, because I still have a chessboard on whose side my father inscribed, with a soldering iron, “SaÅ¡a Hemon 1972.â€� I loved the board more than chess—it was one of the first things I owned. Its materiality was enchanting to me: the smell of burnt wood that lingered long after my father had branded it; the rattle of the thickly varnished pieces inside, the smacking sound they made when I put them down, the board’s hollow wooden echo. I can even recall the taste—the queen’s tip was pleasantly suckable; the pawnsâ€� round heads, not unlike nipples, were sweet. The board is still at our place in Sarajevo, and, even if I haven’t played a game on it in decades, it is still my most cherished possession, providing incontrovertible evidence that there once lived a boy who used to be me.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

“Divided - No tides of time or distance will wash away your step. It does not fleet as they do, those gladiators and their mighty spears or the beasts that howl into the dark for release.
Our story carves deeper, pitilessly, infinitely. A wound that bleeds the ink that stained your palm and the tears of an impossible tomorrow.”
― RJ Arkhipov

“The Offing - And if the sky itself, no matter its hue, were to fracture... What then? Would I then know freedom's name?

In my wake lies the shore—a past where I had been happy—refusing to yield to the tide. Before me, upon the horizon, is the sun... hesitant... inert... A new day cannot rise if its ancestor does not fall. Am I but a pawn in this game? I cannot command the sun to set, nor will the moon to take its place and wash the shore away. That power belongs to kings.

To drown in the offing.
Such sovereign beauty. Such exquisite pain.”
― RJ Arkhipov

“What Will Linger/Hollow of Him - They crept so quietly back. Mere hints of words, at first, then whispers in the loud echoing a winter past. In this place, hollow of Him, his poetry resounded. I could almost taste the fragments of the worlds he had discovered. I remember the ache in his words; you could see each syllable smoulder in his gaze.”
― RJ Arkhipov

“The 32 Society by Stewart Stafford

Fight to the last piece, they said,
Icons of state bring up the rear,
Grunt pawn's first blood duty,
Let the board's body count commence.

Equine knight in dog-legged battle,
Warrior bishop's angular support,
Scorpion's claw pincer movement,
Then, the trap slams mercilessly shut.

The field wiped clean of combatants,
The aristocracy's barren playground,
Royals tour their chequered court,
Pieces reassembled as war restarts.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The master does not care where the game begins but where it ends”
― Saminu Kanti