Dual Coast Magazine closed to submissions a while back, but the archive never went anywhere. There are 160 poems here, alongside fiction, nonfiction, and photography, and all of it is free to read. No paywall, no account, nothing to sign up for.
That much poetry is a lot to wade through, so here is a shortlist. We went back through the archive and picked twelve poems that hold up on a second reading. Some are funny. A couple are hard to shake. Each entry links to the full poem and to the poet’s contributor page, which collects everything else they published with us. If you would rather dig on your own, start with the poetry archive or the A–Z contributor index.
Weary Tune by John Grey
A street busker sings early Dylan to people who wish he weren’t there, and the poem refuses to pity him. “A cap sits at his feet / like a dog / wanting to be fed.” The last four lines land like a punchline delivered with a straight face, and they turn the whole thing on its head.
Bouquets of Necessity by Claire Scott
The speaker hangs around playgrounds and ice cream parlors with an iPad, “gathering up words that blossom / from their lips”: the things mothers say to their children. Some onlookers stare. Why she collects those words is held back until the final image, and it stings.
43 Years by Steve Denehan
A whole life compressed into a list (born, loved, danced terribly, fought and won and lost), and the list is bracketed by one late first: “I was 43 before I saw swans in flight.” The repetition does the work. Short enough to read twice in two minutes, which is how it should be read.
Henry by Lowell Jaeger
A man worries he is “broken somewhere” because grief doesn’t ambush him the way it ambushes his wife. Then he watches an old stranger chat with a restaurant hostess, and what gets him is “the kindness / in his listening.” Quiet poem, long echo.
Driving the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile: A Love Story by Matt Mason
Exactly what the title promises. The speaker wants to “do I-80 in a hotdog hotrod” and daydreams about someday meeting whoever drives the big Hershey’s Kiss. It is genuinely a love poem, and by the last line it has stopped being a joke.
Vacuuming Around the Dead by Timothy Pilgrim
Housekeeping in a funeral chapel, told in clipped strokes: “Dirt finds a way to lie with remains.” Ten lines, nothing wasted, and the dumpster in the closing image is doing more than holding trash.
Parrot on Her Shoulder by Carol Hamilton
Two friends once joked about old age: “You swore you would sit / on your porch and watch / the world pass by,” parrot on shoulder, pirate style. Now they are old, and what actually perches there is less quirky and harder to laugh off.
Bless the Farm Leagues by Daniel Gleason
A litany for a minor-league ball game with a small son: the too-tight turnstile, the program hawker, “the ridges / on the bleachers on our backsides.” The blessing form sounds playful at first. Keep going and notice how much tenderness it carries by the final lap around the bases.
A Trampoline under Snow by Sandra Kolankiewicz
“So much information’s shared in the / unsaying.” A poem about what silence holds between two people, anchored by the image in its title: a thing built for motion, buried and still, waiting out the winter in the backyard.
Supplicants by Elizabeth Spencer Spragins
Five lines, written at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, where “dessicated stones / part their sun-cracked lips and drink” a pittance of rain. The stones do the praying here. One of the shortest pieces in the archive, and one of the most concentrated.
February by John Sweet
Lowercase fragments drifting between a shadowed winter room and the morning the towers fell. One image stays put long after: “snow falling into / the open hands of the blind.” Read it slowly. It earns the silence it asks for.
How to Eat Cherries by Ian Stuart
Instructions, sort of. Begin “In a summer garden / languidly,” and go on from there. A small sensual poem about paying full attention to one ordinary pleasure, which is most of what poems ask of us anyway.
Where to go next
If one of these poets caught your ear, their contributor page links everything they published in Dual Coast, and the contributor index covers all 205 writers and photographers in the archive. The rest of the poetry section is open too, along with fiction, nonfiction, and photography. Everything is free, and none of it expires. And if you are wondering what kind of publication this was in the first place, we wrote a short explainer: what is a literary magazine?
This page is one of two collected on the guides page, if you want the rest.
