Finding Belonging Beyond Blood: How Stephanie Trujillo’s “Apples and Oranges” Celebrates the Families We Choose and the Connections That Heal.
Stephanie Trujillo’s poem Apples and Oranges is a quietly powerful meditation on family — not the kind you’re born into, but the kind you choose. It’s about belonging, about building a support network when your blood family isn’t safe, supportive, or present. For anyone who has felt estranged, overlooked, or out of step with inherited expectations, the poem offers recognition and comfort.
Trujillo, a Liverpool-based multimedia artist of Peruvian and German heritage, brings an honesty and emotional clarity to her writing. Her art — from painting and collage to textile and land art — explores identity, grief, and healing, and her poetry flows from the same impulse: to process, to release, and to connect. In Apples and Oranges, that connection is with the reader, and with the wider idea of chosen families that can nurture, protect, and sustain.
The poem is rooted in Trujillo’s own experience of estrangement. She knows that going “home” isn’t always an option — sometimes, it isn’t healthy. Instead, she celebrates the alternative families she has built: friends, communities, and chosen networks that offer the love and support many assume only blood can provide. In performance, she reads the poem aloud to groups, sharing its difficult truths and its hope in equal measure.
What makes Apples and Oranges resonate is its bravery and its warmth. Trujillo doesn’t shy away from trauma or dysfunction, but she also refuses to let those experiences define her. Instead, she crafts a vision of belonging that feels radical, necessary, and deeply human.
Exhibited across Liverpool galleries and poetry events since 2023, Trujillo has become a voice for those navigating loss, identity, and resilience. Apples and Oranges is more than a poem — it’s an act of reclamation, a celebration of what family can be, and a gentle reminder that home is not always inherited, sometimes it is chosen.
Apples and Oranges
They say the apple doesn’t fall from the tree,
But what if an orange fell instead?
Perhaps these strange fruit don’t pear up,
Perhaps their bond was forced and fed
They say blood is thicker than water, but what if it’s thicker than mud?
Tainted with dirt, disease and other toxicities –
Perhaps it’s time to purify it: turning water into wine,
No bad blood here, only a holy communion with those handpicked from the grape vine
Estrangement is a lonely road, not a choice easily made,
The path is beaten, dark and untamed
And yet here you stand, as a trailblazer and unfazed!
Grief is a strange and yet close companion, a shadow following your every footstep,
Feeding off your fear and hopelessness, cloaking every decision with torment, doubt and pain
There’s no compass to tell you which way is wrong from right,
Just keep trudging through the thick of it, pausing where love finds you without shame
You return to the apple orchard where oranges drop,
And quickly fingers point at you for cutting down the family tree,
But no one stops to question:
Why were you forced to wield the axe to be set free?
Cleared from the poisonous tree that cast long shadows,
There’s space to plant new roots
But don’t be fooled by the sun’s smile,
The grass now greener spits up new shoots
Where you graze as the scapegoat, mewling with guilt for a while
You reap what you sow, you harvest what you reap
You’re probably better off alone
Rather than being stuck in bad company,
Even if they’re the ones that call themselves family
Lay down, let your worries rest – you’re safer here.
You will eventually find your own community,
Webbed together by love, grace and mutual respect
Far away from any old secrets you had kept
The world is full wonder and opportunity,
As well as herds of black sheep,
But know that even if you start to feel lonely,
You’ve created your own home
And this new pasture is a safe haven for you to keep
