Every January believes it is the first page
white, uncreased, smelling faintly of glue.
We swear into it the way people swear into court:
hands raised, mouths clean of last year’s excuses.
In Nigeria, January arrived dry-mouthed.
Harmattan taught the air to rasp.
Morning scraped our throats with dust.
We wore sweaters like borrowed beliefs,
held onto them until noon exposed the lie.
Generators coughed awake before dawn.
Calendars still wore December’s halo,
chicken bones, rice grains, the long amen
after crossover night.
We promised school would be different,
that we would read harder, pray straighter,
that the year would not swallow us
the way others had.
January in America is a longer sentence.
It keeps adding clauses.
Snow edits the world down to margins,
sidewalks erased, trees reduced to bones.
Radiators knock like impatient neighbors.
The gym fills with strangers learning their bodies,
each treadmill blinking a private oath.
A flag pauses at half-staff for King.
Hope wears a winter coat and still shivers.
We begin again because beginning
is the easiest muscle to flex.
We say: this year I will be better,
as if better were a place with a postcode,
as if the body did not remember
every old hunger.
January is too long.
By the third week, resolve thins.
The snow turns gray with footsteps.
In my phone, reminders go quiet.
I miss a morning. Then another.
Back home, the dust settles on our vows.
Here, salt eats the edges of the road.
By month’s end, we are already human again,
already late.
Still, January keeps its small mercies.
A clean notebook.
A bus ride where the city holds its breath.
Cold that sharpens the mind.
A wind—harmattan or Atlantic—
that asks the same question in different accents:
What will you carry through me
when the page learns your name?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Abiodun Odu on Unsplash