LANGSTON HUGHES TRIBUTE ISSUE Meredith Pond   NOBODY HERE Nobody here I know ‘cept you, painted on a big mural, you standing at the mic at the Vanguard, Mingus playing those weary blues as you recite your poems. Your face conjures a time when the city hummed and glittered, and we listened to you on vinyl and slow danced in the corner when Shirley Horn showed up to sing at the One Step Down on the edge of Georgetown, not far from our own dusky river, that cruel-hearted river, all fog and phantom now as we stand here at the boathouse looking out at white on white. Before dawn we walk home. Looking at you reminds me what poetry is, that syncopated beat, the heart pounding, all that foot tapping to music only we can hear.   Meredith Pond makes her home in Takoma Park, MD, a nuclear-free zone. Her poems appear in the Georgetown Review and Poetry Magazine online, and her short fiction is included in the anthology Gravity Dancers: More Fiction by Washington Area Women. Pond received her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at American University in Washington, DC, where she studied storytelling, poetry, and fiction.   Published in Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2011.