Dodo Eraser

Before I pulled muscles in my neck just from reading a book, I would sit on my bedroom floor and rip the heads off of Barbie dolls, yank off their legs, and impale their heads onto their perfectly pointy feet. And then they would be The Leg Ladies—

Perfectly horrifying,
terribly chic.

No wonder my mother put me in trauma counseling at the community center. And after watching her only daughter, her beautiful baby girl, sever Barbie into parts, she probably needed trauma counseling too. (sorry!)

Leg Ladies came back to haunt me with their faces sunk in and their waxy naked legs, often with hair plucked and chopped from their scalps, makeup running down chemical cheeks.

I can’t lift my head off the pillow today. My skull
is caving into itself. Goodbye, occipital lobe.

I need somebody to snap the wiring of my ankle back into place, and while you’re at it, my hip won’t stop snapping and popping. My hair falls out in wisps. It’s like whoever has my voodoo doll is turning me into one of them—
a Leg Lady.

A decade later, my mom watches me, her only daughter, her beautiful baby girl,get ripped apart, limb by limb, fighting whoever plays with her, popping joints back into the socket and getting back inside the dream house.

Perfectly horrifying,
terribly chic.

Satori is an author, poet, teacher, and community activist based in Chicago. Her writing explores themes of identity, belonging, and transformation, drawing on her upbringing in Upstate New York, generational trauma, the immigrant experience, and love in all its forms. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Writers & Books Rochester, Raging Opossum Press, WREATH Literary Collective, Milwaukee Avenue Messenger, and more. Satori’s debut collection of poetry and prose, Monsters, Clowns, & The Holy Fool, was published October 2025 with Raging Opossum Press.