eyelashes thickly woven together and fluttered like butterfly wings

her face covered with drops of morning dew

she still looked as lovely as a girl - just a few years older than her students

and as her silk-lined voice passed over the room they spilled timeless truths and ancient secrets, they made the ears of the most fed up students bloom like sunflowers who hadn't felt sunlight on their skin for so long

looking down at her stack of papers, she picked up a few of them and started to read:

- This project is based on Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

- You will be writing poems based off Alice in Wonderland settings and characters. They can be a collection or a single poem. These poems will be done with a partner.

- Your partner is the person next to you in your new assigned seats

Creativity: __ / 50

Participation: __ / 20

Total: __ / 70

*Note: I wanted to try something new and give less requirements and more freedom for you yourselves to be creative and openminded. However, just because there are only two requirements for the project doesn't mean there won't be any expectations

- This project is for the a1ice magazine, a poetry magazine that wanted some student poems. They were looking for poems right when we began reading Alice in Wonderland, and I thought it would be cool to make it a project.

- Each pair will write the poems together, and the pair that scores the best from the rubric will have their poems published

- This is a competition where everyone wins even if one pair is chosen for publication

staring over the copy of the rubric on her desk, over the dark ink that screamed a million colors and threads of imagination for the new project, she felt something spark within her. she wasn't often excited for projects.

looking around at her desk partner of the assigned seats, she glanced at the boy in the hallway, his eyes blank as he stared down at the desktop.