Pages Matam begins his “Piñata” as a spectator, listening in on a lighthearted conversation held on public transportation, tainted with stinging, victim-blaming implications in regards to sexual assault. Matam illustrates the devastating effects of sexual assault, and the acidity of making jokes out of another person’s suffering. Matam utilizes moving metaphors, parallelism, and allusion to explicate his keynotes. The end result is a powerful display of the strength required to survive and heal from physical and emotional trauma. A confrontational, eye-opening poem, Matam utilizes a beat style of poetry, unwavering in the front of injustice, patriarchy, and rape culture. Poems about violence and rape often discarded while selecting a memorable poem due to the uneasiness of discussing a haunting topic. Matam approaches a sensitive subject with a strong voice and an even stronger delivery. Matam compares the act of breaking open a piñata with a baseball bat to violating an individual’s personal…show more content… Matam moves from Fritzl to his young students, also survivors of sexual assault, and eventually to his own experience suffering molestation at the hands of a trusted relative. After referencing the Fritzl case, Matam discusses the sexual assault survivors encountered in his day-to-day life as a middle-school teacher, from his students to his own personal experience in adolescence. Allusion bridges the gap between the piñata metaphor and the reality in this poem by also referencing the Mahmudiyah killings committed by United States Army soldiers in Iraq, “Tell the depression, the post traumatic stress, the unreported. Tell Mahmudiyah, a footnote in the history of crimson Iraqi sands, how beautiful the military’s silence is cloaked in how we don't ask, and they didn’t tell, in the name of