Middle Creek
Publishing & Audio

“Paige Buffington’s Halchita Red is a cinematic series of poems & prose poems drawn from memory and sampled fragments of conversation—external and internal—as an antidote to the record becoming warped or lost. Paige Buffington's family is originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. She is Navajo, of the Bear Enemies Clan Born for White People. In Halchita Red, Buffington offers a text—or rather, a voice—a sepia light, a visceral reminder of what has survived with its beauty intact, despite what 400 years of colonization continues to attempt to disappear. This work acts as a reliquary of words and stories finding their way home. Buffington's cinematically-expressed sentiments are simultaneously gorgeous and gritty —"Water at our waists, red sand in our hair."—images that set the scenes and moments as in-between, expressing resilience in the face of colonization and generational trauma. The father says, "The smartest ones leave this place," while simultaneously the elders remind us that, "we would never be alone as long as we took care of each other." The lines of these hybrid prose-poems are a memoiric magic which "throw bees in the mouths of our dogs for protection, spit in their mouths so they’d never leave."  
 

In his book, There There, Tommy Orange states, “We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which we feel," and in Halchita Red, Buffington persuades the reader to "remember the taste" and scents of many things, including potatoes, boiled coffee, cigarettes and sand.The background soundtrack is of wind through clothes on the line, Waylon Jennings and Stevie Nicks, bird-patterned skirt-hems sweeping dust. Like wild horses in the rain, the reader is asked to "place your mouth to the cold," as Buffington does, and to imagine "the valley of grass as your bed."  We return to grandmother, remember father, meet the despair of those returning from the upside-down mirror-landscape of service in Iraq. The memories are countered by the sense that love, family and community, are fields fallowed by war through estrangement, separation, fragmentation—all the dark ways in which war lingers insidiously inside those who return home after service. This field, like Halchita Red itself, is the field where the narrator continues, nonetheless, to sow seeds.

Halchita Red is a record of oxidized-iron spinning, a multi-generational, Native narrative of loss, grief, heartbreak, hope, and beauty. Buffington's poetry, with it's rich somatic subtext, gives the us a way to identify with her experience—in a way we can feel. Hitchhiking, jukebox, constellations. Drawn lines. Collecting both pollen in jars and scars, at the edges of worlds. Mixtapes, red-tailed hawks. Counting minnows, counting stars. In a life learning how to grow old in red willow valleys, we should “repeat the words like cedar and meadow, cicada” and remember grandmother's spirited advice, “be careful, but keep going.”

 

—David Anthony Martin, founder, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio / Middle Creek Press, and author of Span, Deepening the Map, Bijoux, and The Ground Nest

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Paige Buffington is Navajo, of the Bear Enemies Clan, born for the White People. Her family is originally from Tohatchi N.M., a town sitting at the base of the Chuska Mountains in Navajoland. She received an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2015. Hashtags accompanying her poems have included “American West,” “memory,” “family,” and “desert Southwest.” Her poems can be found in The Dine Reader, Narrative Magazine, Honey Literary, and Contra Viento, among others. Her poem “From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque” was awarded the 2023 Zocalo Public Square Poetry Prize. Her essay, “What Are You Looking For?” was selected as a finalist for the 2024 Waterston Desert Writing
Prize.

 

She currently lives in Gallup, N.M. She teaches Kindergarten near the Rock Springs,
Yatahey, and China Springs communities.