“The American Dream” by Dan Grossman

A mountain of falsa blankets over Ajo, Arizona - Shutterstock AI image

The American Dream

(Ajo, Arizona)

 Tom Kiefer showed me his downtown
Ajo studio full of goods confiscated
from migrants by Border Patrol, goods
he’d gained access to while working

 as a custodian at the local Border 
Patrol station. He photographed the items 
in tasteful geometric arrangements
and he showed the photos in museums

 throughout the US. The confiscation
policy, he said, struck him as wrong.
But the curatorial text in his exhibition
catalog, expounding on art’s power

 to act as a moral light, didn’t have much
of an effect on me. I was impressed
more by the goods he’d accumulated
than by his photos. I was struck most of all

 by the thousands of falsa blankets, in a heap,
rising like a mountain over Ajo.
Over its sleepy bungalows, its historic
plaza, and its abandoned copper mine. 

First published in The Indianapolis Review: The American Dream – The Indianapolis Review