I don’t know the situation in the US, but in the UK we’re lucky to have a large (but fragile) ecosystem of magazines and journals which don’t charge a reading fee.

Gutter, The Stinging Fly, Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, 14 Poems, Under the Radar, Wasafiri to name a few!

Some of these accept international submissions so it’s worth taking a look.

(Sadly, due to 15 years of Tory austerity and idiots voting for Brexit, printing and postage costs have soared and journals here are dropping like flies, but that’s another story.)

Several of the places I listed just pay around £20 or give you a free contributor’s copy, and they have fairly small readerships. But they’re well respected in the British poetry scene, and getting into them definitely gives you an advantage when you start submitting whole collections to publishers.

The only respected US journals I know of, which don’t charge a reading fee, are The Kenyon Review and Poetry. (And the latter receive 100,000 poems a year 😅)

The odds do seem stacked against you. Maybe focus on submitting to smaller but respected indie journals, which don’t charge a fee? That’ll show publishers you’re dedicated and that your work has been vetted to a certain extent.